Swift for the Curious

Wednesday 5th October 2016, 6:30 pm.

Speaker: Phil Nash, JetBrains.

Venue: Room 4.31, University of Edinburgh Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB.

This event is free of charge and open to all. No registration required - just turn up.

Refreshments and networking from 6:00 pm.

This meeting is supported by NCR.

Synopsis

Swift – Apple’s new programming language – has just turned two years old - and is already at Version 3.0. It has significantly evolved in that timeand is now fully open-sourced! It’s had one of the fastest adoptions of any new language ever (for reasons we’ll discuss) and has been turning the world of Apple development - and beyond - on its head.

But what’s special about it? How does it stack up against other modern languages? Is it a functional language, as some seem to suggest? Does it have any unique features? Should you care about it at all if you are not in the Apple eco-system (or even if you are)? We’ll look at answers to at all these questions and get a flavour of the language itself.

About the speaker

Phil is a developer advocate at JetBrains for their Swift, Objective-C and C++ tools: AppCode, CLion and Resharper C++, having previously working in as diverse fields as finance, agile coaching and iOS development. A long-time C++ developer he also has his feet in Swift, Objective-C, F# and C# - as well as dabbling in other languages. He is the author of several open source projects - most notably Catch: a C++ and Objective-C test framework.