Up to now, the principal language for OS X and iOS development has been Objective-C. This is a language based on C with a veneer of object orientation derived from Smalltalk. If you think that sounds like a neat and elegant programming language, I can only assume that you’ve never used Objective-C.
The new language, Swift, retains some C-like syntactical features but it attempts to be much simplified (you can write a ’Hello world’ program in a single line of code) to make it as accessible as, say, Python or Ruby. But unlike Python or Ruby, Swift is compiled and Apple claims that programs written in Swift run super-fast.
While Swift (and the Xcode 6 IDE which supports Swift development) are still in beta, you can start learning them today as both the language documentation and a pre-release version of Xcode 6 (including Swift) are available for download:
Apple’s Swift website
Swift manual (download from iTunes)
Swift documentation (online)
Xcode 6 (beta) download
What’s New in Xcode 6?
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