Explore the current state of Apple's Swift programming language in this 57-minute conference talk by Ash Furrow, author and iOS engineer at Artsy. Discover why Swift was developed, addressing problems in Objective-C and how it solves them. Learn from Furrow's experience developing a production application using Swift, and gain insights into the language's technical and business readiness. Delve into topics such as language evolution, memory management, native Unicode strings, collections, conciseness, named parameters, generics, lazy evaluation, type extensions, index paths, and open-source development. Examine the language's progression through August, September, and October, and hear predictions and safe bets for Swift's future. Gain a comprehensive understanding of Swift's capabilities and potential impact on iOS development.