IBM Gets Hipper with Swift
IBM is notorious for being the stodgy old man of the tech sphere. They’ve been around a long-time and (barring IBM Watson) in terms of fielding new innovations that tap into the zeitgeist of the times, they’ve often lagged behind. With IBM’s recent introduction of IBM Bluemix Runtime (IBM’s multi-faceted cloud platform as a service) for Swift, they’re proving that they’re showing that they can indeed get down and dirty and hang with us rambunctious youths.
For those unfamiliar, Swift is Apple’s baby. It’s the programming language that they’ve developed for macOS, iOS, OSOS–basically any contemporary Apple OS that you can think of. It’s concise, natural language nature has made it a big hit with the coding community, especially for those who have any ambitions to make anything for an Apple OS (mobile devs, I’m looking at you!). It works for both client-side and server-side development, requires less memory usage, and overall causes less wear and tear on hardware, all of which results in a coding language that make’s everyone’s lives a whole lot easier.
Adding to the appeal of Swift is the fact that Apple has made it simple (and FuN!!!) to learn. Take for instance the Swift Playgrounds app for the iPad, in which users learn how to use Swift by guiding around a small avatar through a puzzle. Cute.
If you’ve followed me on Quora, Medium, or Twitter then you’ve probably noticed that I am a really big fan of Swift:
Swift is universally agreed to be cool, hip, language, which makes it all the more baffling (read: smart) that IBM would want to get in on it. In December, when Apple made Swift open-source, they got their chance. Now IBM is looking to be a key player in the Swift ecosystem. All of their Swift Tools are now Swift 3.0 compliant, including:
- Kitura web framework
- IBM Swift Package Catalog
- And IBM Cloud Tools for Swift
Plus, IBM is taking a page out of Apple’s books and making Swift easy (and FuN!!!) to learn with their own sever-based tool learning system dubbed the Swift Sandbox.
In a world where more and more developers are needing to create services that connect to the cloud, IBM’s decision to get behind Swift is a smart one and one that the coding community as a whole should benefit from.
For more info on IBM’s latest piece, I recommend you check out this piece by Jonny Evans.
