Chris Lattner spent a year and a half creating a new programming language---a new way of designing, building, and running computer software---and he didn't mention it to anyone, not even his closest friends and colleagues.
He started in the summer of 2010, working at night and on weekends, and by the end of the following year, he'd mapped out the basics of the new language. That's when he revealed his secret to the top executives at his company, and they were impressed enough to put a few other seasoned engineers on the project. Then, after another eighteen months, it became a "major focus" for the company, with a huge team of developers working alongside Lattner, and that meant the new language would soon change the world of computing. Lattner, you see, works for Apple.
The language is called Swift, and on June 2, Apple released a test version to coders outside the company, billing it as a faster and more effective means of building software apps for iPhones, iPads, and Macs. Even then, four years after Lattner first envisioned the language, it came as a shock to all but a limited number of Apple insiders. Vikram Adve was Lattner's graduate adviser at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, helping him fashion the software that would serve as the foundation for Swift, but Adve was just as surprised as anyone that his former student had spent so many years building a new programming language. "Apple is so tightlipped, and Chris has drunk the Apple Kool-Aid," Adve says, laughing. "I knew he was working on a project that dominated his time, but that's all I knew."
>'Apple is so tightlipped, and Chris has drunk the Apple Kool-Aid. I knew he was working on a project that dominated his time, but that's all I knew.'
Typically, when a new language appears like this---out of nowhere---it needs years to reach a mass audience. This is true even if it's backed by a tech giant the size of Apple. Google unveiled a language called Go in 2009, and though it was designed by some of the biggest names in the history of software design---Ken Thompson and Rob Pike---it's still struggling to gain a major following among the world's coders. But Swift is a different animal. When it's officially released this fall, it could achieve mass adoption with unprecedented speed, surpassing even the uptake of Sun Microsystems' Java programming language and Microsoft's C# in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Part of Swift's edge is that it's built for the average programmer. It's designed for coding even the simplest of mobile apps, and with a rather clever tool Apple calls "Playgrounds," it offers an unusually effective way of teaching yourself to code. But the larger point here is that such an enormous number of programmers have an immediate reason to use Swift. Today, hundreds of thousands of developers build apps for iPhones and iPads using a language called Objective-C, and due to the immense popularity of Apple's consumer gadgets, these coders will keep building such apps. But Swift is a significant improvement over Objective-C---in many respects---and this means the already enormous community of iPhone and iPad developers are sure to embrace the new language in the months to come.
"With Google Go, there was no real incentive to use it," says Paul Jansen, who has tracked the progress of the world's programming languages for nearly fifteen years with the Tiobe Index, an independent, if rather controversial, measure of coder mindshare. "The difference with Swift is that there is incentive."
>'People will jump to this new language because it's so much easier to code in. They have to use either Objective-C or Swift, and most people will go for Swift.'
Even now, with the new language available to only a limited number of coders, over 2,400 projects on GitHub---the popular repository for open source software---are already using Swift, and this month, it debuted at number 16 on Tiobe's list of the world's most-discussed languages. Yes, something similar happened when Go debuted in 2009, and the Google language has since fallen much lower on the list. But that automatic incentive that Jensen describes will only push Swift higher up the ladder.
Because of Swift's unique position at the heart of the Apple universe, says Facebook programming language guru Andrei Alexandrescu, all it has to do is "not suck." There's a certain truth to his quip, and at the same time, the language very much exceeds this low barrier to entry. "People will jump to this new language because it's so much easier to code in," Jensen says. "They have to use either Objective-C or Swift, and most people will go for Swift."
More Than a Language
Chris Lattner oversees all of Apple's developer tools---all the tools that let both Apple engineers and outside coders build software for the company's PCs, laptops, phones, and tablets. As a graduate student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, working under Vikram Adve, he created a kind of meta developer tool called LLVM, and this creation now underpins Xcode, Apple's primary tool for building software, a tool who's latest incarnation has been downloaded over 14 million times. Basically, LLVM is a way of generating and running new applications, and it can be molded for use with any programming language.
Apple
