Maybe I have some duff feeds in my RSS reader. Maybe I have a few poor choices of people that I follow on Twitter. But I see links along these lines all the time:
How do you do something in Swift?
The answer is, almost always, exactly the same way you’d do it in Objective-C!
You want to do pull-to-refresh? Same.
You want to play with location services? Same.
You want to display one of the new UIAlertControllers? That’s the same, too.
I’ve not had much chance to go out and take any pictures of “Autumn Colour” — this weeks PhotoFriday challenge — so far this year, so this is one from “the archives.” It was take in Japan.
Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Blur.” I’m entry number 87.
I’ve taken pictures of things that are more “Curvy” — this weeks PhotoFriday theme — than Tower Bridge, but I’ve used most of them in previous PhotoFriday challenges.
Graham Lee’s “Why is programming so hard?” made me think about how I started programming and whether I’d be coding now if I was twelve.
When I began, I had a Sinclair Spectrum. Back then, home computers booted into a programming language (BASIC typically) and to do anything you needed to know at least one command. To be fair, even then many people didn’t get beyond J, Symbol Shift-P, Symbol Shift-P (‘LOAD “”‘, the command used to load a program from tape).
Of course, the person in this boat on Ha Long Bay is far from alone, which means I’m very much faking this weeks PhotoFriday challenge, “Solitude.” But he looks alone and the landscape is empty and beautiful so I think it fits the bill!
Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Black and White.” I’m entry number 48.
It’s been a while since I entered PhotoFriday, but, for something I did quickly on my iPhone, I really like this image. And it’s one that works well in Black and White, which happens to be this week theme. It’s the charred remains of a building that burned down not far from home.
Over the years I’ve been asked to do a lot of programming aptitude tests. I’ve had to do some in the last couple of months and I’m deliberately writing this now before I get the results back of the most recent one so you won’t think that this post is just sour grapes…
I’m not going to get into the details of the tests because it doesn’t really matter what they are or who administered them for the purposes of this post.
If you look at the Swift Language guide, you get the distinct impression that the type system is sleek and modern. However the more you dig into it the more eccentricities you find.
The one I’m going to look at today makes sense only if you look at the problem domain from a slightly skewed perspective. I’ve been trying to think whether this is a sensible, pragmatic way of designing a language or a mistake. Judge for yourself.
I’m seeing a surprising amount of vitriol aimed at Swift, Apple’s new programming language for iOS and Mac development. I understand that there can be reasoned debate around the features (or lack thereof), syntax and even the necessity of it but there can be little doubt about the outcome: if you want to consider yourself an iOS developer, it’s a language that you will need to learn.
The only variable I can think of is when you learn it.