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Tim Cook: Coding Languages Were 'Too Geeky' For Students Until We Invented Swift (thestar.com)
theodp writes: Speaking to a class of Grade 7 students taking coding lessons at the Apple Store in Eaton Centre, the Toronto Star reports that Apple CEO Tim Cook told the kids that most students would shun programming because coding languages were 'too geeky' until Apple introduced Swift. "Swift came out of the fundamental recognition that coding languages were too geeky. Most students would look at them and say, 'that's not for me,'" Cook said as the preteens participated in an Apple-designed 'Everyone Can Code' workshop. "That's not our view. Our view is that coding is a horizontal skill like your native languages or mathematics, so we wanted to design a programming language that is as easy to learn as our products are to use."
I was thinking COBOL...
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Congratulations you invented LOGO!
Or, they could've dug through their own software catalogue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
Because the world needs more "programmers" that think like this.....
Do us all a favor Cook, get rid of it. If they need a "cool" language to be programmers, then we DON'T need them to be programmers. We WANT the geeks who will try to make their code as efficient as possible, or implement a RFC with immaculate detail. We WANT them to know the limits and pitfalls of their chosen language forwards and backwards so that they make better more secure code. We DON'T want people who will only code if a monkey can do it. (Chances are you could automate that anyway.)
I'll take the geek's code over the quarterback's code any day, and if we had our way Cook, you wouldn't have a choice about it either. (We want some laws to forbid the company ideal of profit over responsible software development.)
I wish they did. I learned to program on Hypercard. It took care of one of the biggest 'problems' with most languages now, a GUI. Python's GUI tools are still a mess that don't always work cross platform.
It was easy enough and came with enough built in documentation that 13 year old me could figure it out before Stack Exchange.
Its virtue signalling and educational political correctness.
So much money has been added to gov education over the decades from the gov and private sector in the USA.
The amount per student in some city and states should have produced amazing results if a lack of spending in the past was the only problem.
After decades of testing the results are not looking as good as expected. Average students given support, funding, new computers, GUI robots, computers in the home still all fail to study, won't learn, cant pass tests, cant pass exams.
The politically correct educators cant admit they got it so wrong for many decades and that all that new funding was wasted on below average students.
So its has to be what was been used to educate the very average and below average students. Change the computer education and the results for below average students will improve for some reason.
More spending and a new way to look at computers has to work in ways that past funding and new computers did not.
Everyone just wants to keep the funding going and see the next gen of computers sold and supported.
The sales pitch is the new language. In the past it was robot kits, tablets, laptops, GUI, desktops, new calculators with the needed new textbooks.
The test results stay the same every generation as the problem is not lack of funding, the lack of computers, the wrong computer language.
The students just won't, cant, have no interesting in study. Every other aspect of education has been improved. Books, GUI, buildings, food, more teachers, better teachers, more gov money, private sector money, computers.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Back when I was a PhD student, I came across a study showing that about 10% of the population naturally uses hierarchies in their mental model of structure. This came up in the context of HCI research, where you find things like filesystem hierarchies that make complete sense to some people and are largely incomprehensible to others. This was one of the reasons for iTunes' early success (before version 5, when they completely screwed up the UI): music was in a flat library, with arbitrary filters. You could filter by album, artist, or genre independently, there was no hierarchical structure. Geeks said 'why would I need this, I already have my music in a music/{genre}/{artist}/{album}/ hierarchy, people too stupid to understand that shouldn't use computers'.
Why am I talking about this? Because almost all mainstream programming languages implicitly adopt hierarchical structures. We have namespaces containing classes containing instance variables and methods. We have nested scopes. We have call stacks of subroutines (though coroutines are starting to come back into fashion).
So what makes Swift different? Absolutely nothing. It has a load of marketing behind it, but structurally it is no different from any other Algol family language with some Smalltalk influence. It requires thinking in precisely the same way as Objective-C or Java, it just spells some of the things differently. And it is both more verbose slower than Objective-C++ for pretty much every task.
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