Swift first impressions

Douglas Hill • 3 June 2014

Apple has a lot of new developer stuff for us this week. Some miscellaneous early thoughts on their new programming language, Swift:

A couple of months ago, I wanted something with Soulver’s persistent answers column and also the power of a full programming language, like Matlab. (But please not Excel.) Playgrounds are it.
Playing around, I find I can do
```
  10.intValue
```
but not
```
  let ten = 10
  ten.intValue
```
because 'Int' does not have a member named 'intValue'. And then I can not do
```
  pow(ten, 2)
```
because 'NSNumber' is not a subtype of 'CDouble'. I don’t know what 10 is: Int or NSNumber?
It seems there’s so much new stuff to learn I might as well switch to Android development.