Apple's new Swift programming language takes flight with Getty Images, American Airlines, LinkedIn, and Duolingo

Swift, first introduced last June at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference before shipping in September alongside iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, tightly integrates with Chris Lattner's LLVM compiler. Swift intends to accelerate code writing, introduces modern programming concepts and aims to prevent common errors that can lead to app crashes.

"We've been blown away by the reaction to Swift, our new programming language," Apple's chief executive Tim Cook stated last week. "Inventing a new programming language is something very few companies can do and we believe it will have a profound effect on our ecosystem."

Creating a new programming language is an ambitious undertaking, but rapidly gaining adoption among developers is also steep challenge. In addition to the unique ability Apple has to promote and encourage adoption of Swift as the owner of the iOS and OS X platforms, Swift is also—by design—intended to be easy to incorporate into existing development projects alongside existing Objective-C code.