Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Tim Cook: Coding Languages Were 'Too Geeky' For Students Until We Invented Swift (thestar.com)

Posted by msmash on from the inventor-of-everything dept.

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."

25 of 335 comments (clear)

  1. Congratulations you invented LOGO! by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 5, Funny

    >> we wanted to design a programming language that is as easy to learn as our products are to use

    Congratulations you invented LOGO!
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)

    1. Re: Congratulations you invented LOGO! by iapetus · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I was thinking COBOL...

      --
      ++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
      Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
    2. Re:Congratulations you invented LOGO! by red_dragon · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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?"
    3. Re:Congratulations you invented LOGO! by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:Congratulations you invented LOGO! by drinkypoo · · Score: 3

      Hypercard's logical successor is Filemaker Pro. I don't know whatever happened to that, but it let you construct interfaces by dragging and dropping. Back when web interfaces were a relatively young thing, I participated in creating a tool to let users select VLANs on Catalyst switches so that they could connect ports on their desks with ports in the testing lab using Filemaker Pro on Windows as the server, and perl on Linux for the backend (using Expect to actually talk to CatOS.) That took about three days, including making it acceptably attractive and usable. And web interfaces aren't (or weren't, no idea what's up with Filemaker now) even the program's primary goal.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    5. Re:Congratulations you invented LOGO! by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Informative

      I suspect he's still out there, somewhere, causing people to be stuck with Filemaker.

      Doubtless an open-source, platform-agnostic solution works better. I use Drupal these days when I want to do a job like that. It provides all the usual functionality you expect from a CMS, and a fairly small set of modules will let you create views on arbitrary database tables so that you can use it as a glorified database reporting tool without ever writing a line of code, CSS aside. You just create views. And the CSS is only needed to make it look pretty, not to make any sense of the information at all. And there are export tools.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  2. Exposure and accessibility by ArtemaOne · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I can see exposure and accessibility being a factor in getting people interested in computer programming. Kind of like Carl Sagan's and Bill Nye's attempt to get simplified science to the masses. The reach sparked a passion in people that may have never had a reason to get into the field and expand their horizons.

    1. Re: Exposure and accessibility by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I think Tim Cook is just publicizing Apple.

    2. Re:Exposure and accessibility by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  3. Coding is cool bro! by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 5, Funny

    Code like a beast Bro! Bro that code into shape! Be awesome! Beer at noon. Pointers? What are you a nerd? Memory management? That's like for the CPU to deal with, bro, be bro! Efficient code? BRO! They keep making faster CPUs! Mutilate that code!

    Bro, it's got what your body craves.

    1. Re:Coding is cool bro! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.)

  4. Wait, what? by squiggleslash · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I know Jobs had an RDF, and Cook presumably wants to copy that, but the RDF was supposed to affect the people around him, not himself. Does he really think Swift, which is another me-too language that looks like almost every other popular programming language except Python, is somehow not "geeky"? It's no more or less programmer hostile than Javascript FFS.

    Is Cook trolling? That's got to be it, right?

    --
    You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    1. Re:Wait, what? by AHuxley · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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"
    2. Re:Wait, what? by Hal_Porter · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I dunno, I think he's smarter than he looks.

      Consider.

      Back when people wrote code in Objective C it was easy to have some Objective C for the iOS UI, some Java for the Android UI and a big gob of portable C/C++.

      Now if they write the whole app in Swift it will be easier to get it running on iOS. And it seems like there are various projects to get Swift running on Android too.

      E.g.

      https://medium.com/@ephemer/ho...

      I.e. Apple have something which is a competitor to writing everything in C# and using Xamarin to target both platforms.

      Xamarin has always seemed a bit horrid to me frankly. And doing the 'big gob of portable C/C++ with two sets of UI code is also horrid.

      If Apple can build a platform that people use for IOS apps knowing they can run well on Android they've got a pretty compelling platform. And if it turns out not to work very well on Android they've got more iOS exclusive applications.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    3. Re:Wait, what? by werepants · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      What the hell are you talking about? In my state, total per-pupil funding is about $7000-$8000/yr, and has barely been keeping pace with inflation. For reference, daycare for one kid costs about $2000 PER MONTH here - what the schools get is a pittance by comparison. And keep in mind that daycare can be done by college students and stay-at-home moms, while teachers must have a bachelor's degree, minimum, and often have an advanced degree. Many of those are STEM degrees, worth quite a bit in industry.

      The schools haven't been adequately funded for decades, and things are only getting worse.

    4. Re:Wait, what? by Solandri · · Score: 4, Informative
      Schools are vastly over-funded. The U.S. spends more on education per student than any country except Switzerland. While a few states dip into the $7k/yr per student range you give, the national average is over $12k/yr per student.

      Total expenditures for public elementary and secondary schools in the United States in 2013â"14 amounted to $634 billion, or $12,509 per public school student enrolled in the fall (in constant 2015â"16 dollars).

      (Discrepancy with the OECD stats is due to being from different years, and the OECD stats including post-secondary non-tertiary education, while the NCES stats are for only K-12).

      Spending per student has about doubled in inflation-adjusted dollars over the last 40 years. and tripled since the 1960s. It peaked around 2007, and the people trying to get even more money put into education have been abusing that by using 2007 as the start of their spending graphs.

      Where is all the money going? I don't have time to find it again, but the Education Department's own stats are contradictory. If you take the amount of spending it lists in teacher non-salary benefits, and divide it by the number of teachers they give, it ends up something like $50k/yr per teacher. What's going on is the number of non-teaching administrators has exploded since 1970, far outpacing the growth in number of students. These administrators have been hiding it by shifting some of their salary expenses into those of teachers in the stats. Every time education receives a spending increase, the administrators sop up most of it and let only a trickle get through to teachers. Every time education receives a spending cut, these administrators pass it all on directly to the teachers and students, while protecting their own jobs and salaries. As a result, the teachers are constantly complaining of not having enough money despite the huge increases in education spending over the decades.

  5. The 60's called: they want BASIC back by klubar · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you want easy to use languages that teach the concept of programming (as opposed to ones for developing professional applications) there are better choices.

    I think there needs to be a distinction between intro languages and ones used for developing complex, large applications. It's great to give beginners (whatever their age) an intro to programming and maybe Swift is the language for this.

    This is sort of the same as the woodshop class for 7th graders that doesn't use power tools. Great intro to woodworking, but not the approach you'd use if you were building a house. The class might inspire kids to learn more about the field -- which is all you are looking for.

  6. Tim Cook says a lot of shit. by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Just because the CEO of Apple says something doesn't mean he's not totally full of shit. Does anyone honestly think removing the 3.5mm jack from the iPhone was about courage?

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
  7. Less geeky? by Daetrin · · Score: 5, Funny
    I've never used Swift, let's see what the code samples on wikipedia look like...

    var str = "hello,"
    str += " world"
    ---
    let myValue = anOptionalInstance?.someMethod()
    ---
    let leaseStart = aBuilding.TenantList[5].leaseDetails?.startDate
    ---
    guard let leaseStart = aBuilding.TenantList[5]?.leaseDetails?.startDate else {
    //handle the error case where anything in the chain is nil
    //else scope must exit the current method or loop
    }
    ---
    protocol SupportsToString {
    func toString() -> String
    }
    extension String: SupportsToString {
    func toString() -> String {
    return self
    }
    }
    ---
    func !=(lhs: T, rhs: T) -> Bool

    Ahh yes, it's very clear how Swift is so much less "geeky" than other languages like C# or Java! I'm sure a student looking at it for the first time would instantly realize how much better it is instead of saying "that's not for me"!

    --
    This Space Intentionally Left Blank
    1. Re:Less geeky? by mwvdlee · · Score: 5, Funny

      It's the lack of semicolons. Kids think semicolons are geeky ;)

      --
      Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
  8. Stupid argument, is stupid. by geekmux · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Complaining that programming code is "too geeky" is like complaining that a steamroller is "too flatty".

    We have enough issues and vulnerabilities being generated today by the "geeks" who have the mental capacity and intelligence to code.

    The last thing software security and integrity needs is coding dumbed down to the point where Cletus T. Dipshit is at the programming helm of next-gen solutions.

  9. Agreed, LOLCODE more geeky by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Probably the students had the (usual) comparison between Swift and LOLCODE. Here is a Wikipedia example of Swift:

    guard let leaseStart = aBuilding.TenantList[5]?.leaseDetails?.startDate else { //handle the error case where anything in the chain is nil //else scope must exit the current method or loop
            }

    Here is an example of LOLCODE:

    HAI 1.0
    CAN HAS STDIO?
    I HAS A VAR
    IM IN YR LOOP
          UP VAR!!1
          VISIBLE VAR
          IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10? KTHX
    IM OUTTA YR LOOP
    KTHXBYE

  10. Tim Cook? Really? by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That's the man that thought removing a headphone jack from a cellphone is a good idea and that having non-replaceable batteries are what customers want.

    Who in their sane mind listens to an imbecile like that?

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  11. That's only half of the problem. At best. by Qbertino · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yes, PLs need to be consistent, easy to learn and easy to use. All true. But PLs also need to offer easy solutions to tougher everyday problems. Cross-platform portability, the ability to easyly abstract away the hard stuff like networking, GUI, graphics and such and an easy integrated way to swtich from OOP to functional to sequential, from event-driven to imperative and back.

    The PL squaring the circle the best right now is Python. And it show, as Python is the only PL used professionally in every field you can think of while at the same time being known for a very n00b friendly PL. If Apple want's Swift to compete/beat Python in that field they have to offer all that Python offers + a free cross-platform IDE + a binary cross-compiler for all major platforms including mobile. You know, like Python freezing, only better. That would be something new and get opinion leaders on board. Until then I'm not hodling my breath.

    My 2 cents.

    --
    We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
  12. Re: Oh God by Monster_user · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Might be a good comment. Just because we can, doesn't mean we should. Who benefits from a large base of barely coders?

    One of Microsoft's advatages early was was that it was easy to program for. Bring down the difficulty of programming, and you bring down the cost of the programmer. Bring down the cost of the programmer, and you bring down the cost of the software. Bring down the cost of the software and you open up the market.

    However, bring the time and knowledge to program down too low, and you end up with bad programmers and users that blame the OS and/or computer, not the skill level of the programmer.