Biography | Tim Cook — He Handed Developers a New Language in Jobs's Last Hall

On 2 June 2014 Tim Cook opened Apple's twenty-fifth Worldwide Developers Conference in Moscone West.

Three years earlier Steve Jobs had given his last WWDC keynote in this hall.

Cook's morning previewed iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite.

It ended with a programming language.

Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, introduced Swift.

Apple presented it as a language that would sit beside Objective-C, share the same runtime, and compile through LLVM in Xcode.

Playgrounds let a developer type a line and watch the result without building the whole app.

Federighi described Swift, in the company's briefing language, as Objective-C without the baggage of C.

The same keynote added about 4,000 new APIs, app extensions, HealthKit and HomeKit.

Cook called the SDK the largest developer release since the App Store.

Swift apps could ship to the store when iOS 8 and Yosemite reached the public that autumn.

Moscone West, at 800 Howard Street, had been the default WWDC hall since the mid-2000s.

Apple left it for San Jose in 2017 and then for Apple Park.

The building still runs other conferences.

A visitor will find no plaque for the morning a new language was named.

Cover: the same hall dressed for WWDC in June 2011.

The banner year is earlier than this keynote; the glass box is the one Cook walked out of in 2014.

Photo: Anton Zelenov, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.