Yesterday, Eric M. reached out to pair with me today on learning some Xcode and Swift. So today, after spending a good portion of the morning struggling to update a new version of Xcode on to my machine*, I started watching the first of these videos to learn more about it and Swift. I didn’t get very far, before it was time to set-up for 8LU and lunch.

Instead of pairing in the afternoon with Eric we watched the rest of the video together along with some other apprentices. When we finished, I paired with Eric until he had to leave.

Initial Thoughts on Xcode and Swift:

Eric said something about Xcode that I think is really true “It has low discoverability”. Meaning that given it’s incredible functionality it’s really difficult to know your way around - similar to IntelliJ. It was really helpful to watch the video and get a look at someone else using and explaining it before jumping in.

Swift is an interesting language with the fact that it’s strongly typed and the use of optionals. It’s Object Oriented but seems to try and take the best of functional programming languages as well. I didn’t get far. Just enough to create a calculator app that allowed a user to hit buttons with numbers on it, and have them show up in the display, as well as another button that clears the display. I think Anda and I might continue working on this together as a Waza project since we are both interested in iOS development.

*the App Store basically assigns an ID to the the account of the person who downloads it, and since my machine wasn’t wiped properly that wasn’t me. I had to uninstall and then reinstall a new version to make things work unfortunately, that was not the first or second thing I tried.