On June 2, 2014, Apple announced the Swift programming language. It was pioneered by Chris Lattner, the same guy who spearheaded the LLVM compiler project. Though Swift is a modern programming language meant as a replacement for Objective-C, it currently shares the same runtime as Objective-C, which is why the two languages are interoperable in the same project. However, that’s not the direct point of this post, but it is one of the reasons Objective-C will continue being important in the near term.

What I want to get at is the fact that there are millions of existing Objective-C developers who have gone through the motion of learning Objective-C, stumbling onto problems, and working with the community to post solutions on StackOverflow or open-sourcing third-party categories/frameworks/libraries/SDKs on Github. The Freshman class of Apple developers will be going through uncharted waters with the rest of us, however, they won’t be able to tap into the last 7 years worth of crowdsourced knowledge (7 if you’re an iOS dev, more if you’re an OSX dev) due to their lack of knowledge of Objective-C.

Though Swift was only announced 72 hours ago, I think it’s safe to say that it may take a few years for the community as a whole to fully move over to Swift. This includes posting solutions in Swift’s syntax to common problems (for example: UITableView-related issues) and porting or rewriting entire libraries in Objective-C to Swift (for example: AFNetworking, if @mattt and company decide to do that).