The author mentions that Apple often nudge their idea of the future forward each year at WWDC. I see no different with Swift: the introduction of Playgrounds, teaching resources, finesse over small details, etc - to me indicate Apple wants to make this a language that the next generation of developers grow up learning and using.
Quite a good move on their part if it is successful. If kids start learning Swift at school, they get exposed to Apple devices (not necessarily but this is where the teaching resources are aiming), and they've got developers in their arena from an early age.
Yeah, Swift needs ABI stability, but I also understand that they don't want to screw it up by adding it too soon. Because the goal of Swift seems more long term oriented, short term ABI stability isn't worth risking a 10 year goal for.
"Quite a good move on their part if it is successful."
I haven't used it, nor do I work in education, but what I have read of it, it at least is successful in the sense that those who use Apple's Swift training material find it to have good quality.
"In times past the experience was that, if you were an able student in Computing, you would get your programs working. If you were not an able student, your experience would be almost insurmountable challenges to get anything working. Working or not-working was the differentiator in the class.
In the Learn to Code curriculum, I found that everyone got something working. The difference between the stronger students and the weaker students then was more to do with evaluations of the complexity of their solution, the understandability and style of their solutions or other factors like memory and time efficiency.
I have never really had these kinds of conversations in classes at this level before. It has been an incredibly satisfying year to get the opportunity to debate which of three possible solutions is the 'best' for a given problem and, further, what definition of 'best' we should accept."
"Apple is working with leading device makers to make it easy to connect to Bluetooth-enabled robots within the Swift Playgrounds app, allowing kids to program and control popular devices, including LEGO MINDSTORMS Education EV3, the Sphero SPRK+, Parrot drones and more. The Swift Playgrounds 1.5 update will be available as a free download on the App Store beginning Monday, June 5."
Quite a good move on their part if it is successful. If kids start learning Swift at school, they get exposed to Apple devices (not necessarily but this is where the teaching resources are aiming), and they've got developers in their arena from an early age.
Yeah, Swift needs ABI stability, but I also understand that they don't want to screw it up by adding it too soon. Because the goal of Swift seems more long term oriented, short term ABI stability isn't worth risking a 10 year goal for.