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Apple Introduces Swift Playgrounds App To Teach Kids To Code (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: At their Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco today, Apple CEO Tim Cook said, "We believe coding should be a required language in all schools." To help achieve this goal, Apple introduced Swift Playgrounds, a new app that is meant to teach kids basic coding skills in Apple's chosen language. It teaches concepts like loops and conditionals, and uses an animated character tasked with performing simple challenges in a digital maze to help make learning fun. The app also offers suggested coding languages and will be completely free. Tim Cook described it as "a powerful new way for kids to learn to code," and went on to compare writing code to basic literacy. "I wish Swift Playgrounds was around when I was first learning to code," said Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering Craig Federighi. "Swift Playgrounds is the only app of its kind that is both easy enough for students and beginners, yet powerful enough to write real code. It's an innovative way to bring real coding concepts to life and empower the next generation with the skills they need to express their creativity." Apple announced a host of new features and improvements made to iOS and Mac OS X. Not only did they announce that OS X will now be called macOS, but the first version update will be called macOS Sierra. One of the biggest new features of the new OS is support for Siri.
Anybody remember Logo, with all those drawing turtles? I remember my first introduction to recursion was in Logo.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Of all of the new programming languages that are out there, the future looks exceedingly bright for Swift.
The new languages I'm referring to are Go, Rust, Swift and Scala.
The worst of them is Rust. Its problems are numerous, ranging from a single buggy implementation, to awkward semantics, to a limited standard library, to a community that's hyper-focused on codes of conducts and forcing "tolerance" on all, to extreme hype. It doesn't help that it's backed by Mozilla, which a lot of people have their doubts about now that Firefox's market share has been dropping so low. Rust is generally seen with distrust by many.
Go was looking promising for a while. It's backed by Google, and generally has good semantics. It has two implementations, including one built upon GCC. It has a reasonable community, and a large selection of high quality libraries. The language itself is quite primitive, and feels like it never got out of the 1990s, and its semantics and syntax both underwhelm.
Scala was also looking promising for a while, but it ended up being extraordinarily complex, and very slow. Targeting the JVM ended up being a mistake, as it limited the usefulness of Scala for many users. Its community also remained quite small. Scala combined the worst of the Java mindset of unnecessary complexity with the worst aspects of functional programming.
Swift, on the other hand, has everything going for it. It's backed by Apple, and has already seen much use for real applications. It has been continually improving, even if this means some breakage (which isn't a problem even for the least-skilled of developers). Its semantics are superb, and very practical. Its syntax is clean and easy to work with. It's modern and fast. Its standard library is getting better and better. Now that it has been open sourced and is supporting other platforms it is becoming a real winner for lots of programmers.
If we look ahead 10 or 20 years, we'll very likely see Swift being the only one of those four languages seeing any real use. We've already seen Scala pretty much drop out of existence in practice. Go is starting to stagnate. Rust never even got out of the gate to begin with, and likely won't go anywhere in the long run as there are doubts that Mozilla will even be around in a few years (or if they are, they may not be able to fund Rust's development). Swift is the only one that's seeing real growth, and it's the kind of growth that we've seen from mainstays like C++, Java and C#.
Although it's a young language, Swift is already showing that it has the staying power to be the sort of language that's still happily used decades from now.
I have lost track of how many "teach the great unwashed masses to program/code" initiatives and gimmicks have come out since Logo. Has anyone anywhere actually done a real-world study to see if people subjected to this force-feeding actually becoming credible working programmers, or maybe even developers? And I don't mean a web "developer." I learned to program (many decades ago) because my job required it, I found out I enjoyed it, and I had things that I needed to do with it. Any time I want to learn a new language I wait until I find a project that could actually make use of the new language. Just coding some random thing that someone else thinks is neato-keeno (I said I've been doing this for decades) never taught anyone how to do anything. So, are there some hard studies on which to base throwing more money at this problem?