Last month I welcomed the news that Apple had released a new programming language, called Swift, for OS X and iOS. I am not a huge fan of Objective-C, an unwieldy mix of C with (supposedly) Smalltalk-like extensions. But that language, until now, has been Apple's default for developers.
However, it wasn't all good news. It turned out that Apple had decided to make the Swift language available only to paid subscribers to its Developer Program. So if you wanted to try it out you would have to fork out $99 a year for the privilege of downloading beta software. I thought that was pretty daft. And I'm glad to see that someone at Apple seems (finally) to have thought the same thing. A few days ago, the Swift download became available for free, HERE. You have to register in order to download it (as part of the XCode 6 beta download) but registration is free. I shall be learning Swift over the weeks ahead and I'll let you know how I get on with it.
