It was a calculated risk. Since the company I was working for, at the time, was never going to use Swift, my "bread and butter" was at no risk, whatsoever. We were a C++ shop. I just started working with it on nights and weekends.

Being a C++ shop, however, we were quite familiar with Lattner and LLVM, so we were aware of his propensity for WIN. That gave me some confidence, going forward. Also, Apple didn't just announce a language. They also announced a full system API, as well as a product roadmap. The API showed they were serious about it. Those don't come in Cracker Jack boxes. They take some serious work and investment.

It was definitely a risk, but I'm a conservative, scarred veteran of many errors in judgment (can you say "OpenDoc"? I knew you could!). I wasn't about to run into a burning dumpster, half-assed, and I thought it was worth it. I knew it would take four or five years to mature, and it has. I tend to play the long game. I learned that, from all those years, working with the Japanese.

I'm rereading your previous comment multiple times but unfortunately still failing to see what you're referring to. The only explanation I can see is "we were quite familiar with Lattner and LLVM, so we were quite aware of his propensity for WIN. That gave me some confidence, going forward."

> They also announced a full system API, as well as a product roadmap.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "a full system API", and does Apple ever announce a product roadmap? I would definitely be interested in this roadmap of which you speak. :-)

I apologize.

They have had a Swift roadmap forever. I think it's now kept on swift.org. I'll see if I can find it. I think it's a fairly sparse one. I really only cared about the evolution through ABI Stable. All I needed to hear, was that was a goal.

You are right. They tend to eschew roadmaps, but they did a "hard-sell" with Swift. They knew it would be difficult to build momentum with.

"Full System API" is the native frameworks; UIKit, AppKit, WatchKit, etc., as well as things like WebKit and MapKit.

When Swift was announced, they had APIs for most of that stuff. I was pleasantly surprised. I had a full app, working within a day or so (using beta Xcode, of course).

Ok, but that came later and wasn't present in 2014.

> they did a "hard-sell" with Swift

I agree with that. :-)

> "Full System API" is the native frameworks; UIKit, AppKit, WatchKit, etc., as well as things like WebKit and MapKit.

Swift did of course have bridging to Objective-C and the preexisting Objective-C API. I find it strange to equate language bridging with announcing a full system API — an API originally announced around the turn of the century (can't believe I'm using that phrase now). Cocoa-Java, which no longer exists, also had such bridging, as does PyObjC and MacRuby/RubyCocoa. Still, most of the system API to this day are written by Apple in Objective-C.

SwiftUI shows promise, but it is still quite nascent.

Pretty much every bit of code I write is "pure" Swift linkage. I like things like Swift's enums too much to give them up. They make APIs really fun.