Chapter 1. Swift Basics

Swift is a relatively new programming language designed by Apple Inc., and was initially made available to Apple developers in 2014—primarily intended as a replacement for the aging Objective-C language that was the foundation of OS X and iOS software development at the time.

Unlike many object-oriented languages, which are based on older procedural languages—for example, C++ and Objective-C are based on C—Swift was designed from the ground up as a new, modern, object-oriented language that makes programming faster and easier, and helps developers produce expressive code that's less prone to errors than many languages.

While not based on an older language, Swift, in the words of its chief architect, Chris Lattner, " was inspired by drawing ideas from Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list." (Chris Lattner home page: http://nondot.org/sabre/).

Swift was initially a proprietary language, but was made open source software in December 2015 as of its version 2.2. While Swift remains primarily used by developers targeting the Apple macOS and iOS platforms, Swift is also fully supported on Linux, and there are unofficial ports under development for Windows as well.

The objective of this lesson is to learn the fundamentals of using the Swift programming language. In this lesson, you'll learn basic Swift syntax and program structure. You'll also learn how to use Swift built-in data types and enums, and how to declare and use Swift variables and constants. Let's get started.