I preordered the book ”Functional Programming in Swift” shortly after it was announced. I got a chance to meet Chris Eidhof at 360|iDev, which was a really awesome experience. He really knows his stuff and he is a wonderful person.

However, I have found it has been a little difficult to get into the Functional Swift book. I know there is a lot of really important content in here that I think is vitally important for people to be aware of, but I feel like it is being presented in a slightly obscure manner. This is not a beginning programming book and it can be a little difficult to break into.

I am trying to write more technical posts on my blog. I wasn’t doing this for a while because I was working on my book ”iOS 8 SDK Development.” I was so stressed trying to learn all the stuff we were writing for the book that the thought of going and writing technical posts for my blog was a little discouraging.

Now that the book is pretty much completed and I don’t have any conference talks to prepare for a while, I would like to spend more time writing technical blog posts. One series of posts I would like to do is analyzing the Functional Programming in Swift book.

I was a beginner not too long ago and I know how incredibly daunting it can be to be confronted with a bunch of technical stuff you don’t quite grok yet. I know that Chris is passionate about functional programming and I hope that he will not be offended by my efforts to spread the word about his work and to try to sugar coat it a little for people who are not as far along as the target audience for his book was.

I am going to try to tackle a chapter every week or two. If I am slacking on this, please harass me on Twitter so that I know that people are actually reading and getting some use out of my posts.

If people have things they would like me to write about, please hit me up on Twitter about it. I am happy to go out and figure something out that people want to learn more about.

I hope that doing this analysis will open new people up to things in Swift that weren’t possible in Objective-C. I know that right now it is very hip to hate on Swift. I was rather unhappy about Swift when it was first announced because I was under the impression that many things we do were going to be abstracted away. I didn’t like Ruby on Rails because you could write three lines of code and have a functioning website without understanding anything going on under the hood. I am an incredibly curious person who wants to have a deep understanding of how things work. When I was able to shift my perspective on Swift I became very excited about learning a new way of doing things. I hope that other people will do the same when they become familiar with how to effectively write Swift.

If you want to know what my current long-term project is, check out this blog post from my boss, Brad Larson. So far, we have not found anything we have wanted to do that could not be done more efficiently in Swift. We have had to use a few work arounds with the compiler, but we have not encountered any show stoppers.

I have been disappointed with all of the people who are claiming that Swift is broken and that it shouldn’t be used for serious projects. If Brad and I can use Swift on the Mac to communicate with an electronics board through a serial port, you can figure out how to use Swift to communicate with an API. It is just a question of working with the language, not fighting against it.

I hope over the next few months I can help others learn how to work with Swift. I think that is is a promising language and I hope that people can learn to open their minds to new ways of thinking about how to program.