In June, Cupertino-based Apple Inc. revealed plans to open source its new programming language, Swift. The company made good on that promise this week, by officially declaring the language open under the Apache License.
The developer community welcomes the move, as it allows them to contribute improvements and optimizations. With the language now in the hands of coders everywhere, there is far less reliance on the mother-ship for updates, patches, and permissions
One of the great benefits of dynamic-typed languages is that they are able to add functionality to an object on run-time. For example, you can create an object and then add functions to it, giving it the desired behavior, without a complex inheritance structure. Moreover, when calling the object’s methods, the client can determine whether the object supports a certain operation or not.
Static-typed languages do not come with this advantage. Creating objects that share some behavior can be done by inheritance, yet this restricts the combinations of behaviors an object can have (unless it relies on multiple-inheritance, which has some tricky effects).