One of the biggest changes in the transition from Objective-C to Swift is the new type system. This change is at the heart of Swift’s language design, from optionals over value types to constrained generics, and to truly understand the language, a thorough understanding of its type system is indispensable.

In this talk, I will explain the advantages of Swift’s strong commitment to a sophisticated type system. I will illustrate the impact on language and program design through a series of examples, drawn from my experience of developing one of the first Swift-based applications published in the Mac App Store and illustrated by walking through key design issues in a simple iOS app. I will discuss why type-driven design benefits from functional programming principles, and also, how it allows us to write less tests without a loss of confidence in our code.