The first language I had ever written any code in was Objective-C. I taught myself everything about Objective-C that I could find in online tutorials, books, and Apple documentation. Being my first language, I thought Objective-C was the best language and nothing would come close to it. Even after I expanded out and taught myself PHP, Ruby, and JavaScript I always thought Objective-C was the most well rounded and complete language. I was also writing Objective-C when there was no such thing as ARC and you had to manually manage your memory. Even with its shortcomings, I loved Objective-C and everything you could do with it and how easy it was for me to pick up.

When Swift was announced in June at WWDC I was not as excited as others were about a new programming language. Throughout my four years of Objective-C development I had never come across anything that I would have blamed Objective-C for, most of my blame went to the Cocoa/Cocoa Touch APIs. While I had little excitement for Swift, I did download the The Swift Programming Language iBook and started to play around with Swift in Xcode Playgrounds. And while there were plenty of shortcuts to make things “easier” to write, nothing stood out to the point where I wanted to drop everything and start writing Swift only. I also wasn’t getting excited since Apple said they would be changing the syntax based on developer feedback, which was great for the language and really helped it grow in the past two months. The last thing that held me back was I wanted to write an App that used some of the new Extension functionality of iOS 8 and Yosemite, but every time a issue/bug came up it was difficult to figure out if it was a Swift language issue, beta OS limitation, or me writing buggy code. After a few weeks I decided to put Swift aside and continue to write Objective-C code.

It wasn’t until a week ago that I had some free time and re-downloaded the The Swift Programming Language and Using Swift with Cocoa and Objective-C iBook along with the latest Xcode. This time when I used Swift I quickly found myself loving the shortcuts and the various improvements it has over Objective-C and found myself wanting to convert some of my projects over to Swift. I’ve even had issues going back to Objective-C for work projects since I would try to write Swift code and it would cause errors, mainly me not adding a semicolon. Over the past two months Swift has matured and I can’t wait to see how it grows over its life.