Lately I’ve been getting my feet wet learning the latest new programming language from Apple that everyone is talking about: Swift. The short conclusion is that it’s pretty good, but unsurprisingly has quite a collection of glitches: some of them are fixable, some of them are annoying arbitrary choices that I’ll get used to, and others are probably more like design flaws that are unlikely to ever go away. I’m cautiously optimistic that the latter category is fairly short, though still too early to call it. And because Swift is such a new language – hot out of the oven, as it were – I was not inclined to rush in and start coding up anything that’s directly important to my company’s cheminformatics software stack, so instead decided to take a little detour and make a new app from scratch: something fun, that I’ve been meaning to do for ages, called the Beer Lab Notebook, written entirely in Swift, with no non-Apple dependencies. But more about that particular project in a later post. Continue reading →