Swift is kind of like when you’re a kid and you fill the bag of jelly beans with all your favorite flavors and then reach in and have a handful all at once. Each was a good idea, but together it lacks anything that made any single piece good.

Swift & the Objective-C Runtime:

Even when written without a single line of Objective-C code, every Swift app executes inside the Objective-C runtime, opening up a world of dynamic dispatch and associated runtime manipulation

With an opener like that, how can you not read (and be both slightly horrified and optimistic)?

Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift - Download Free Content from Stanford on iTunes:

Updated for iOS 8 and Swift. Tools and APIs required to build applications for the iPhone and iPad platforms using the iOS SDK. User interface design for mobile devices and unique user interactions using multi-touch technologies. Object-oriented design using model-view-controller paradigm, memory management, Swift programming language. Other topics include: animation, mobile device power management, multi-threading, networking and performance considerations.

I really just have no words for that.

Coding in Swift would be much easier if the damned IDE (the only one that you can use for it today) would actually work when editing Swift code.

As it stands, however, Xcode regularly tries to compile while you’re halfway through writing a symbol and then leaves the error up there for minutes at a time until you manually tell it to re-build the file. Then if you do something unexpected like actually delete something and then type something new then the syntax highlighting (and general language-based parsing) get boned all to hell and give you nonsense like this:

At first the idea that a collection in Swift could only be one kind of object bothered me, but I’m slowly seeing a useful pattern emerging from this — one that Obj-C made tedious due to its grafting of an pass-by-reference-only object pattern on top of another language.

In the specific case that I just solved, for example, I have a table controller with a static list of choices and actions that would be performed when clicked. In Obj-C I’d probably do something like: