Mr Deng's IT News Collection: Traditionally, there was a gap between compiled programming languages, such as Objective-C and C++, and interpreted languages, such as Python and Ruby and PHP. With compiled languages, after you wrote your code, you had to wait for your compiler to turn it into executable software, but once it was built, this executable software ran extremely fast. Interpreted languages let you test your program nearly instantly, but in the end, it didn’t run as quickly. Swift bridges this gap, giving you the best of both worlds. The new language makes it far easier to build and run something without sacrificing how quickly it can run. As Ash puts it, Swift is “friendly to programmers and still friendly to the machine.” He says “it still remains to be seen how this will work out,” but he calls Apple’s work “promising so far.”