Swift Beginner: Starting Out

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Hello, my name is Mark Nair, and in these lessons, you'll learn a Swift overview, Xcode, the command line and the REPL. In this lesson, I'll take you in a short tour of Swift's history. Before Swift people, used Objective-C to write apps for iOS. Objective-C closely related to the C programming language, is more than 30 years old. It was the basis for the NeXTSTEP operating system. Apple acquired NeXT and NeXTSTEP in 1996, and started using Objective-C in its developer toolkit. In 2014, Apple introduced Swift as a modern replacement for Objective-C, calling Swift, "Objective-C without the C." in 2015, with Swift 2.2, the language became open source. This is Swift.org. You can download Swift releases for different platforms here. You can run Swift on the Mac, Linux, and Windows. For this course, we'll be using a Mac with Xcode. Swift comes built in with the Xcode installer, so you don't have to download anything separately. Today, most often people use Swift to build apps for iOS devices in the Mac, although there's a growing movement to use Swift for server side applications. This means instead of learning a handful of languages and frameworks for web development, you can use your Swift skills to rely on just one language, Swift. And now, there's SwiftUI, which is a declarative framework for building your user interfaces on top of your Swift code. The team that created Swift had three main objectives, make a language that is safe, fast, and expressive. Safe, means Swift forces us to write code that has fewer risks of crashing. Learn about type safety and how this will help you. Fast means Swift quickly, can evaluate and iterate over collections of data. It also means it'll use structs to help us with memory use which makes our code faster. And finally expressiveness, means Swift syntax is easy to read and understand. Let's take a quick look at some things that makes Swift, oh, well Swifty. Here's a line of Swift code. It's a perfectly valid line of Swift that compiles perfectly fine. We can import other libraries or frameworks where from the start, we don't need that with Swift, we can just start writing code. Unlike some other languages that require a semicolon to end a line, Swift doesn't, although we could put one here if we wanted to, and that works okay. But in Swift, we like to simplify, so you won't see this business of semicolons at the end of lines. The compiler can read the line breaks just fine without them. Swift is a C-style language. That means that we use curly braces with our code, like this, it's curly brace, curly brace. And when I double click the curly braces, we can see the chunk of code within the braces the compiler recognizes There are other a few C-style techniques, hints, echoes, that you'll learn as we go on. But for now, just keep in mind, Swift has this style as a nod to its heritage and to act as a familiar development language to more experienced programmers. It also is a way that it can wrap our logic into good chunks of code that we can recognize and then work with it. In this course, we'll be using Xcode to write our Swift code. There are quite a few online services where you can write Swift in the browser as well, but Xcode gives us extensive assistance when we're writing our code. Stay tuned for the next lesson where I'll show you more detail about the Xcode interface, and how we begin to use it in our first steps into writing Swift. Thanks for watching.