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0 pointsmakeitdouble3y ago0 comments

Education perhaps. Kids in middle school or lower might get iPads and not laptops, and programming can be part of their curriculum.

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kemayo3y ago

They actually have that one covered with Swift Playgrounds: https://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/

You can, in fact, write an app and publish it to Apple's App Store with it, all from an iPad. I have no idea how much actual uptake this has seen, since I think the capability only came out at the start of the year?

hot_gril3y ago

This is probably fixed now, but around the days of Swift versions 1-3, Playgrounds were straight up broken. Very basic programs would segfault the compiler. I feel bad for any kids who may have been introduced to programming that way.

saagarjha3y ago

The new Swift Playgrounds is far better than what came before it. Those versions were pretty much unusable for sustained work.

dwaite3y ago

Very simple programs would segfault the compiler in 1-3 as well. You'd most often notice this as your syntax highlighting went away for a period of time.

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makeitdoubleOP3y ago

Playgrounds is mostly a local running environment if I am right ?

If you teach a class, having a CI build and run the programs, potentially taking screenshots for you to review later could be a pretty good use case, especially for remote home work.

pdpi3y ago

"Xcode Cloud is a continuous integration and delivery service built into Xcode and designed expressly for Apple developers."

This is a (presumably well-integrated) alternative to CircleCI. There's nothing about this particular product that would make it even remotely relevant for a middle school programming curriculum.

At any rate, what you're asking for already exists — Swift Playgrounds has been around for years, it's specifically tailored for learners, is kid-friendly, and already lets you take the whole journey from your first line of code to publishing on the App Store.

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