Smashing Swift

I have been playing with Swift ever since Apple announced it at this year’s WWDC. I was lucky enough to be there, and I spent a good chunk of my time in the labs, coding and asking the engineers who created it questions. There is nothing like being among the first to get your hands on a language, and being among the first to explore it. Even if you immediately find ways to break all the things.

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In the past, I have loved two things in programming languages: code-as-data, as in Lisps, and strong type systems, as in Haskell and Scala. Coincidentally these are functional languages. I say coincidentally, because their functional aspect is not the primary reason I loved them. What I loved was their ability to simplify a part of the general problem of programming.

Lisps simplify syntax and implementation details; Haskell and Scala simplify logical correctness. Specifying a type...