Erica makes some very good points.
Swift looks like an awesome programming language, but it seems to be a “moving target”. For example, getting rid of a basic function println which all of the introductory Swift texts taught .
What Apple should have done is deprecated the features in Swift 1 that were removed in Swift 2. Yes, they did provide a migration feature in Xcode, but when you are starting to learn a new language you shouldn’t have to put it through a migration process.
I’m all for adding features and enhancing programming languages. This helps keep them fresh and useful, but not at the cost of basic language features.
As my programming background is in Cobol I know that IBM and other Cobol compiler writers supported many levels of the language as new versions of Cobol came out.
When I started at my current shop almost 20 years ago they weren’t using many of the newer features of Cobol 85 like intrinsic functions but over time they did accept them into their coding standards.
I’d like to really start learning Swift, but how much of what I learn in Swift 2 will be around in Swift 3? I do feel that Swift is the future of programming and we should embrace it, but it would be more helpful for newbies to the language to still support in some way the Swift 1 features that were removed in Swift 2.
Every day, more and more developers are being hired based on their Swift skills. Apple is committed to Swift and Swift is the future. Not a day goes by without some developer wandering by for Swift…