My background before learning Swift
I am a retired teacher, programmer, systems auditor, systems analyst, systems administrator, database administrator, and IT manager, who is doing a bit of personal coding to keep his brain active and delay Alzheimers, Death, etc.
My programming environment includes fortran, 6502 and 8080 assembler, dBase II and III, Borland’s Turbo Pascal through to Delphi, Lazarus/Free Pascal, C, C++, Oracle PL/SQL, PHP and Java, on platforms of CP/M (on a Microbee), MS DOS, Windows, Netware, Solaris, BTOS, PrimOS, MVS, VMS, HPUX, SCO, various flavours of linux, and OS X
I kept returning to Pascal because of it’s strong typing, and, as the years progressed, memory management. […something I was lacking in!] Lazarus is a great environment in which to develop programmes, but it has come across an anomaly with not having a supported, standard debugger to use on OS X (as at early 2015). It is only temporary, but this was the catalyst to look further, and Swift has a disciplined approach to coding on a platform — OS X — that I solely use now.
Plus, I would like to write something to run on IOS.