WWDC this year was one of the more interesting keynotes I've seen out of Apple in my 13 years of following them. From start to finish, there was a level of confidence I haven't seen in recent events, and I think it's due to a lot of long term bets starting to pay off. They had so much to talk about, they skipped their traditional keynote openers of Apple Store discussion to talk about iOS 8, OS X 10.10, and new developer APIs/tools.

A new modern programming language, Swift seems to be the biggest piece of this. Development of it started a few years back, and was made possible by Apple's extensive work with extending LLVM. Looking back, small hints appeared in Objective-C of the modernization efforts underway (ARC, Blocks). Many developers saw those efforts as a sign that Apple would stick exclusively to Objective-C for a long time, with no hint of the new language being developed in parallel. I'm starting to work though their ebook to learn the language, with a goal to make an iOS 8 app with it.

The interesting aspects of Swift for me revolve around their balance of 3 goals. Safety, Performance, and Modern features. Similar efforts by Microsoft led to .Net frameworks and the C# language. Apple only made a new language, bringing over all the existing Cocoa frameworks. An interesting approach that is enabling any existing Cocoa app to swap out file by file Objective-C for Swift. Apple's goal for the language is to have it usable as a scripting language all the way through to an entire operating system. Will be interesting to see if Apple pushes any Swift code out at the kernel or other open source components of OS X.

I'll follow up with some iOS 8 and 10.10 specific feedback later. Apple is less restrictive this year in regards to the NDA, including opening developer videos to everyone here.