Cameron Esfahani on Twitter:
My first full time job at Apple was working on QuickDraw. The team was very small: the manager and one other engineer. Right before I started, Apple shipped the first PPC Macs. The QD team had done a lot of work for that so they took long, deserved, multi week vacations.
Read the whole thread.
(It would be so much better if these kinds of stories were posted to blogs, not Twitter.)
Andrew Cunningham:
“Objective-C is not going away. We still love Objective-C as a language; we still very much depend on Objective-C and do a tremendous amount of work in Objective-C here internally at Apple,” Federighi told Ars. “We’ll be supporting Objective-C and continuing to evolve it as necessary to fit into this evolving world. We do think that Swift is the language that we recommend for new developers to our platform who are investing for the future and building new apps. We think Swift is absolutely the right place to start. But we’ll continue to maintain, advance, and support Objective-C for as far as we can see.”
Nate Swanner:
Craig Federighi: We think Swift is the next major programming language; the one people are going to be programming in for the coming several decades. We think it’s a combination of it being a great systems and apps programming language that’s fast and safe, but also being really expressive and easy to learn.
It’s the perfect programming language for anyone who is learning to program all the way to writing systems. We want everyone to learn Swift as their primary language, and we want — when developers invest in Swift — to be able to use it everywhere from scripting to apps for mobile down to writing code in the cloud.
Apple:
The Swift open source code is available via GitHub and includes support for all Apple software platforms — iOS, OS X®, watchOS and tvOS™ — as well as for Linux. Components available include the Swift compiler, debugger, standard library, foundation libraries, package manager and REPL. Swift is licensed under the popular Apache 2.0 open source license with a runtime library exception, enabling users to easily incorporate Swift into their own software and port the language to new platforms. For more information about Swift, and access to community resources visit the new Swift.org