Launched in 2014, Apple's incipient programming language Swift would be open sourced near the end of the year.
Exclusively developed for iOS and OS X, Apple's own programming language Swift would now be made freely available for everyone to play with. Apple Senior Vice President for software engineering Craig Federighi predicted that the Apple lingo would be the programming language of the future so it should be released out in the open for other developers to use, modify and share.
Furthermore, Federighi asserted that making Swift an open-source language would speed up its adoption.
"I think swift should be everywhere and used by everyone. By open sourcing Swift, developers would be able to add on to the language and help accelerate its adoption," he said at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference.
"We think swift is the next big programming language. The one that will be building apps for years to come," he added.
Accordingly, any programmer can now develop apps for OS X and iOS using computers running Linux.
Digital Trends writer Brad Jones said that this move suggests that the tech elitist seeks to satisfy a market who is getting smarter and smarter each day, a market who is more concerned with how a gadget works than how it looks like.
"This audience isn't as easily swayed by minor cosmetic improvements or a new 24/7 radio station. They're more interested in what's under the hood, and the infrastructure that supports the platform in broader terms. They're developers, and they're more important than ever before," Jones stated.
In September 2014, this move was foreshadowed by Infoworld's Peter Wayner. He said that if Apple wants to be adopted by self-taught programmers and by various computer science schools it should be open sourced to make it more affordable and to boost its potential for growth and development.
