The Swift Programming Language

As someone who always disliked Objective C, I think Swift looks very promising. I'll check it out right away :)

Software-wise, I feel these current WWDC announcements are the most exciting in years.

Looking at the Swift docs right now, I can see many interesting inspirations at work: there's some Lua/Go in there (multiple return values), some Ruby (closure passed as the last argument to a function can appear immediately after the parentheses), closure expressions, strong Unicode character support, a very very neat alternative to nullable types with "Optionals". Operators are functions, too.

It has the concept of explicitly capturing variables from the surrounding context inside closures, like PHP does, instead of keeping the entire context alive forever like Ruby or JS.

Hell there is even some shell scripting thinking in there with shorthand arguments that can be used as anonymous parameters in closures, like "sort(names, { $0 > $1 } )".

Inside objects, properties can be initialized lazily the first time they're accessed, or even updated entirely dynamically. Objects can swap themselves out for new versions of themselves under the caller's nose by using the mutating keyword.

There is the expected heavy-weight class/inheritance scheme which accommodates a lot of delegation, init options, bindings, and indirection (as is expected for a language that must among other things support Apple's convoluted UI API). But at least it's syntactically easier on the eyes now.

Automated Reference Counting is still alive, too - however, it's mostly under the hood now. Accordingly, there is a lot of stuff that deals with the finer points of weak and strong binding/counting.

Swift has a notion of protocols which as far as I can tell are interfaces or contracts that classes can promise to implement.

I think generally there are a few great patterns for method and object chaining, function and object composition in here.

The language has C#-style generics, and supports interesting type constraint expressions.

Anyone have any links or resources?

Supposed to be on ibooks

Logo looks a lot like a hammer and sickle.