Craig Federighi Talks Open Source Swift

Andrew Cunningham, writing for Ars Technica:

In open-sourcing Swift, Apple has two main goals in mind. The first and most obvious is to make Swift code more portable and versatile, enabling its use in projects outside of apps for Apple’s platforms.

The company’s long-term vision is even more ambitious. “We think [Swift] is how really everyone should be programming for the next 20 years,” Federighi told Ars. “We think it’s the next major programming language.

“A number of developers, including enterprise developers like IBM, very early on as they began developing their mobile applications in Swift, really wanted to be able to take the talents that their developers were developing and even some of the code and be able to deploy it in the cloud, for instance,” Federighi continued. “We thought the best way [to enable that], ultimately, was open source.”

Update: Nate Swanner at TNW has an interview with Federighi, too:

“In terms of where we hope the open source project will take Swift, it comes back to the original goals of making Swift the language you learn to program in from the outset, and know that when you learn it you’ll be able to use it to accomplish everything you want to accomplish, all the way from building mobile applications to cloud development. Open sourcing it creates a really clear path to what was already starting to happen.

“If a university wants to revise their core curriculum and start teaching programming in Swift, it being open source really makes that an easy decision for them to make.”

★ Thursday, 3 December 2015