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July 02, 2014
Happy Midpoint Day! There have been 182 days so far this year, and there are 182 days still to go.
What are you going to do with the second half of 2014? What is the second half of 2014 going to do with you? Surprises may abound.
For starters, Apple’s big surprise at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference this year wasn’t a new phone or tablet or other gadget, it was a programming language. Read all about Swift in this month's PragPub magazine.
July PragPub Magazine
Since 1997, the language of application development in Apple’s world has been Objective-C. This year, Apple introduced a new language called Swift that replaces Objective-C for OS X and iOS development. That’s pretty radical, but then there’s this: Swift also represents a paradigm shift in programming. So we figured it was worth five articles in this month’s PragPub.
Mark Chu-Carroll explains in our lead-off feature just where Swift came from and what paradigm(s) it embodies. Spoiler alert: the future is functional.
Ron Jeffries has been playing around with a nifty feature of Swift called Playgrounds, and has some thoughts on what Playgrounds mean for Test-Driven Development.
Then Mark takes us deeper into Swift with a comprehensive look at its support for object-oriented and functional programming. Swift has some innovations in areas of type systems and pattern matching, too, and Mark digs into those.
If you haven’t become expert in functional programming yet, Swift may be a good language to start with, and Tony Hillerson’s article may be the place to jump in. Tony goes beyond itemizing Swift’s support for the functional paradigm to explore how to think in functional terms in Swift.
So is Swift perfect? Far from it. As Mark reveals in our wrap-up article, there are a lot of things wrong with Swift right now. Hopefully, Apple will get all those things addressed really soon. So the more of us who get savvy about Swift and its virtues and defects right now, the more likely that is.
That’s a lot of Swift coverage, but Swift isn’t all we cover in this issue. The Agile Samurai Jonathan Rasmusson reveals some inconvenient truths about software, Tom Mahon cautions about becoming the tools of our tools, Dan Wohlbruck takes us back in history to get a sense of what was involved in programming the EDVAC, Antonio Cangiano gathers up all the new tech books of note, and John Shade shares his warped perspective on Elon Musk.
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Upcoming Author Appearances2014-07-02 Johanna Rothman, Manage Your Job Search Webinar
2014-07-03 Portia Tung, Darefest London, UK
2014-07-05 Maik Schmidt, MakerFaire Hannover (Germany)
2014-07-10 Johanna Rothman, Agile New England
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