About
If you did pay attention, this is what the site bio says:
The Swiftloc, a season programmer embarks on an unexpected journey to learn the new programming language known as Swift when on the 2nd of June 2014, Apple stunned the world at WWCD with the surprised announcement of Swift. These are the stories of Swiftloc’s attempt to tame the beast.
So that’s the backstory I’d wants you to believe. Dramatic, Bold with a dash of heroism and a hint of dragon-slaying battle somewhere to be found. Funny as it may seem, if you have a good enough imagination, you can and will find it everywhere you look, including this blog. However, I’d suspect you’d need a healthy dose of imagination to even catch a glimpse.
So what really is the Swiftloc
Swiftloc (there’s a programmer joke in there but I’ll leave it to the reader to figure it out) is about the Swift programming language Apple created to replace Objective-C eventually. It’s a brand new programming language developed by Apple in total secrecy for 4 years until the unveiling at the WWDC 14 keynote on June 2, 2014. At the time of the release, the Apple developer community had their collective mind blown. There were some negativity, no doubt, but from the looks of it, the reactions were mostly positive.
Side note: Why would Apple want to do such a thing
The reason why Apple would want to replace Objective-C is considerably documented and argued about on the Internet with most of the writings and arguments on the topic stems from two articles written by John Siracusa, Avoiding Copland 2010 and Copland 2010 revisited: Apple’s language and API future (If you are interested, there are much more words spilled on the Internet on the subject with a short hop to the web search). Suffice to say, whatever the reason and whichever side of the fence you are on, Swift will no doubt be a big deal and an important step forward in the development environment on Apple’s current and future platforms. It seems like fun writing about Swift and therefore Swiftloc.
The author
Swiftloc is written by me, WeyHan Ng. For over 16 years, I’ve been working for others as a software developer and many more years writing programs as a hobby. I have recently made the leap to become an indie iOS developer. Someday I hope venture into Mac software as well.
Even up till today, I still am very much obsessed about writing programs and to write programs one must use some programming language or another. So, naturally I’m obsessed in programming languages as well. Programming language is not so different from the human languages and they share many similar characteristics. I’ve found in many of us software developers, we have a natural language where we are most comfortable, much like one’s mother tongue. Although unlike the human language, it may not be the first language you’ve learn but there is the special one if you look hard enough. For me, I use to think it is C++ but when I toke the dive into the iOS software world, I find that Objective-C was increasingly becoming my most natural language and it felt to me an order of magnitude more natural over C++. The timing for the release of Swift is rather unfortunate in the sense that I really just found my most natural language and now I need to learn a new language. What’s worse is there is a possibility that Swift may end up to be an unnatural language for me. Regardless, Swift have become an important reality, Swift is what I need to learn.
Finally
This site is also as much about the Swift programming language as it is about me learning a new language. I, like many others, do feel that writing about a subject helps the learning process. In another words, this site will be where I try to bring together two things, the most important technology in the near future for developing on the Apple platform and me trying to learn it.