Swift Playgrounds for macOS

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/swift-playgrounds/id1496833156?mt=12%22

by rock_artist • 6 years ago

434 228 6 years ago

apps.apple.com

adriansky• 6 years ago

Looks very nice! It almost made me want to learn Swift.

The only thing is that it's used only on iOS systems. If I'm going to spend the time to learn a new programming language, I'd like to use it everywhere like I do with JS.

alexgaribay• 6 years ago

Swift can be compiled and run on Linux. It's most prevalent on Apple platforms. It's usefulness outside of the Apple platform is a different topic though.

https://swift.org/about/#platform-support

derefr• 6 years ago

I suppose Swift is like a CLR language (e.g. C#) in that sense, then? The language itself will run in many places, but most of the library bindings anyone might care about, or want to use the language to get access to, are for platform-specific libraries.

gumby5• 6 years ago

The only thing is that it's used only on iOS systems.

It's also used on the macOS, which is kind of the point of this HN posting.

In the magnitude of using a given platform, learning the language is a small part; the APIs and tooling will be a larger effort. If you already know those things for the iOS, the jump to macOS will be less.

bound008• 6 years ago

You may just want to learn a touch of swift to experience nifty language features such as optionals. (Unless you have worked with languages that have all of swift's nifty features)

xkemp• 6 years ago

There's some momentum behind Swift-on-Server, I believe. And Tensorflow Swift seems to be a rather serious project.

melling5• 6 years ago

The Mac app "syncs" with the iPad app. That's useful!

I'm writing a Swift Cookbook on Github for anyone who's trying to come up to speed on Swift:

https://github.com/melling/SwiftCookBook

Trying to be more functional with my Swift:

https://github.com/melling/SwiftCookBook/blob/master/functio...

I'm also working through Joel Grus' Data Science from Scratch book, but trying to rewrite the examples in Swift. I'm only a few chapters in:

https://github.com/melling/data-science-from-scratch-swift

Things I'm doing sitting on my couch with my iPad on the arm and the book in my lap.

odysseus2• 6 years ago

Does the app sync between different macOS computers though? My experience has been: no. Both computers are signed into the same Apple ID ...

jayrhynas2• 6 years ago

Quick note about your functional examples - there's already a built-in version of `take` called `prefix` available on all Sequence types.

Grustaf• 6 years ago

On the other hand there are quite a few ios devices out there...

secretsatan• 6 years ago

More than a few, it's quite ridiculous so many devs are sniffy about it. If you can handle cpp, you can handle swift, one of my biggest gripes right now is having to deal with a cross platform cpp solution that just seems to throw out 10 years of progress so they can implement code like they're used too and reimplement built in solutions slower and harder to work with.

technoplato• 6 years ago

I’ve been a developer for about 8 years now and have even already learned a decent amount of Swift.

I still had a blast getting the adorable character (Byte-) to navigate around the puzzles.

They even get into some simple yet cool path traversal algorithms that I’m sure grow in complexity if you keep going.

I’m going to download these and have a lot of fun with them.

Would love to see this kind of paradigm evolve into more complex domains.

3fe9a03ccd14ca5• 6 years ago

These types of things really are gateways into computer science. I’d like to see it grow too, because early adoption really does set students apart.

I wonder how many top students in compsci programs used to do things like install and tweak Minecraft plugins when they were younger.

gigatexal• 6 years ago

Finally! I’ve been waiting for them to do this.

donatj• 6 years ago

QuartzComposer was the best playground. I really wish they'd give it some love.

jawngee• 6 years ago

Really, QC was one of the cooler things Apple has done since HyperCard.

I wrote a video editor that allowed you to use it to build plugins with it: https://vimeo.com/121663242

Unfortunately, life got in the way of finishing it.

umjames• 6 years ago

I think Apple bought it and renamed it to Quartz Composer. I remember you could use it to make screen savers and could even write your own patches for it in Xcode.

tempodox• 6 years ago

This is nice, to be sure, just too bad it's only for Catalina.

oarsinsync2• 6 years ago

Damn! I really enjoyed Swift Playgrounds on the iPad, but found the lack of real keyboard irritating. I was about to download this until I saw your comment.

My email's too important to risk upgrading to Catalina still.

boardwaalk• 6 years ago

I've heard there were data store migration problems and haven't had any myself, but is this even an issue if you're using IMAP? It's all stored on the server anyways. (I can't imagine using POP in this age of multiple devices.)

throwaway555542• 6 years ago

It is really frustrating that Apple does stuff like this.

dewey• 6 years ago

Being built with the Catalyst framework which is only available in Catalina seems like a pretty good reason to only have this available in Catalina.

gumby5• 6 years ago

That they develop new products that show off the capability of their new products? It would seem odd to me if they did not.

tomduncalf2• 6 years ago

It's built using Catalyst, their technology for running iOS apps on MacOS, which was only launched with Catalina, so there's a good reason for this.

I recently got a new Macbook and was dreading having to use Catalina, having heard horror stories online, but actually my experience has been fine. A few security popups to click through when you first run a new app, but some of the screen shots I saw online of hundreds of them must have been fake, it's really not a problem. Having to right click and open unidentified apps can be annoying, but I'd rather do that and keep Gatekeeper on personally, rather than disabling Gatekeeper entirely.

It actually feels really solid so far (granted its a clean install on a new laptop) and I am really impressed with the Sidecar feature in particular. Of course, if you depend on 32-bit apps or drivers, or certain apps which are meant to be buggy (e.g. Mail referenced in another comment), you may want to hold off for a while!

bwilliams18• 6 years ago

The reason you didn't see the bevy of popups was because you did a clean install. With an upgrade install all of your existing apps have to go through the same security steps as a new app, and they tend to do it all at once, especially if you have a lot of apps that launch at startup. That said my experience was not as extreme as some of the screenshots, and I think it would be even less for the average user. And of course this is only upon first upgrade, so while frustrating, you quickly get over it.

ihuman• 6 years ago

You can still create swift playgrounds in Xcode, but it won't have the coding lessons included in this app.

xenonite• 6 years ago

I am still on El Capitan so I share your disappointment. However iPadOS can be used for this app as well.

haunter• 6 years ago

Ofc Google had a similar project (with Javascript) but they scrapped it back in November... It was even available on Steam

https://github.com/googlearchive/gamebuilder

http://web.archive.org/web/20191017085801/http://store.steam...

You can still download the last full build (easier than compiling on your own) and it's actually really fun https://github.com/googlearchive/gamebuilder/tree/master/bui...

I pretty much hate when they abandon things like that

mattnewton• 6 years ago

As a counterpoint, it’s labeled as “This is not an officially supported Google product.” Maybe this isn’t enough to stave off brand association?

Would you rather they never allow engineers to release it at all? When I worked at Apple, that was the fate of any internal effort or pet project that did not receive full executive buy in, and as an engineer I badly prefer the ability to open source projects in whatever state they were left, to be useful to anyone who wants to pick the bones or start something similar.

Disclaimer: I work for Google, but my opinions are my own.

slimsag• 6 years ago

It really bothers me that people so closely associate these "Not Google" projects with Google. I've seen repositories with not even a README, any documentation, or so much as an explanation of _what the project even is_ end up on the front page of /r/programming just because "Wow it's a Google project!! so interesting I wonder what it does???"

Google is a _huge_ company, not everybody that creates something there is showing some internal direction of the company..

SlowRobotAhead• 6 years ago

It’s not really the same as a learning tool, but Google has FlutterPad [0] which is an online playground for Flutter app development.

Which if you’ve never played with, it’s extremely easy to see how Flutter and Dart work. Most online tutorials can be completed right in FlutterPad. So Google does know people want this, just seem to care more about other things right now.

[0] http://flutterpad.com/

blondin• 6 years ago

they are conceptually different things.

i started exploring swift a few weeks ago and these playgrounds are quite handy. for python programmers: it's like a jupyter notebook but with outputs on the right & auto evaluation.

it's a generic instant feedback tool for swift but deeply integrated with xcode. i think, what apple did here is simply decoupling it from xcode. this is huge because swift is quite powerful and a complex language already. i am curious what direction they take this.

zelly• 6 years ago

I really wish there were stuff like this for more advanced topics. Where's the gamified "write a compiler" course?

jedberg2• 6 years ago

http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs164/

They have a game called "midterm" every few weeks where you can earn points towards a final score. :)

But more seriously, would gamification really help you at that point?

favorited2• 6 years ago

There's the nand2tetris course, which isn't exactly gamified, but it's a project-based course where you learn hardware fundamentals and assembly as you build a Tetris clone.

https://www.nand2tetris.org/course

jedberg2• 6 years ago

My daughter has the Osmo, which has a coding challenge. It's very similar to this, except it's just arrow tiles and jump tiles that you lay out in front of the iPad and then the character moves the same way.

I'm going to have her try this (she's five) and see if it's too hard since it requires reading (or perhaps it will force her to improve her reading skills!).

hombre_fatal3• 6 years ago

it's just arrow tiles and jump tiles

The obvious next step for her is Befunge.

city412• 6 years ago

Some larger screenshots (and more info): https://developer.apple.com/swift-playgrounds/

slashblake• 6 years ago

Real missed opportunity not calling this "Swifty Swift"?

skyfaller2• 6 years ago

Has anyone read through the "Swift Playgrounds 3.2 License Agreement"? It's kinda long.

Would it have killed them to use a standard open source license like MIT or Apache 2.0? Don't they want as many people as possible to learn their pet language?

kick2• 6 years ago

Playgrounds isn't free software, and for that matter isn't even source-available.

skyfaller2• 6 years ago

That's what I'm saying, if they want as many people to learn Swift as possible, why not open source this learning software? The Swift language is open source under Apache 2.0, clearly the license is not alien to Apple.

chrisbrandow• 6 years ago

How will this limit people using it? Are there institutions that won’t allow it? I don’t fully understand the complaint.

jedieaston• 6 years ago

Now, Apple, can we please have the opposite? XCode on the iPad (even if some features had to be removed, like VS Code is to VS), with a containerized shell to run code we write in?

Please?

sillyquiet• 6 years ago

Would be good for testing on device I suppose, but ooooh, I am not too sure how pleasurable coding on a touch interface might be, even with physical keyboard. Also, I would hate to de-incentivize one of Apple's remaining motivations for paying attention to their non-mobile hardware!

novok3• 6 years ago

Well good news you can use a mouse on the ipad now, along with remaping capslock to esc in ios 13.4, all in a 1.5lbs computer.

gadabout• 6 years ago

I've used Pythonista on my iPad and I adore it. The physical keyboard is a personal must-have, but the experience is great otherwise.

qubex2• 6 years ago

The functions that needed to be removed have already been removed. What remains is comes already pre-loaded on your iPad with iOS/iPadOS. It’s called ‘Notes’.

The functionality removed was file management, version control, compilation, building, and interface design. All the rest (text editing) is still already there.

Ha ha, only serious.

Seriously, I doubt Apple is close to allowing a compiler to run on an iPad.

EDIT: Apparently a sense of humour is not a common attribute around here.

RandallBrown• 6 years ago

They already have the Playgrounds app on the iPad.

nickhalfasleep• 6 years ago

The day they provide this, is the day they are clearly signalling the end of macos.

MR4D5• 6 years ago

I would argue that a phone, tablet, and computer can all have the same OS, just with different UI.

So the "end of macos" is unlikely in my book.

month13• 6 years ago

Doubtful, there's still a wide difference between MacOS and iPadOS, if anything they've diverged more in recent years. The multitasking workflow on iPadOS is flux, and has complexity issues.

lowdose4• 6 years ago

This is similar to asking Apple if you can summon Alexa instead Siri on iOS. Not going to happen.

liamcardenas• 6 years ago

How is that remotely similar?

fmakunbound2• 6 years ago

WTF would you want that for? I'm pretty sure the iPad is not designed for general purpose computing.

fmakunbound2• 6 years ago

Is it designed for general purpose computing then?

gumby5• 6 years ago

I don't understand: what would be the advantage?

simonh• 6 years ago

No need to transfer code across from your desktop to the iPad. You're developing directly on the target device, so no emulation and instant on-device testing. Also you can code in any setting where an iPad is easier to use than a laptop. I do a lot of coding in Pythonista on my iPad on the train.

IOT_Apprentice• 6 years ago

Probably not until you see ARM Apple laptops. Even then, I'd imagine they want you to buy that mac to do development. A better feature would be to have hypervisor on the Ipad Pro and be able to spin up linux or ARM based macos.

neurobashing• 6 years ago

I've argued for a while that they need to do, as part of their services push, is a "cloud compile" service. I know they want to sell hordes of Mac Pro boxes to devs, but what a cool way to open up development (like, on the iPad). Write code, save in iCloud Drive, tap "compile my app". It handles all the signing and so on, and then boom, it's on my home screen. You limit distribution to your devices at first - maybe you still need a Mac to sign it for everywhere distribution, but you let any device you own run it. You can share source via the usual open-source methods, since everyone just needs to get the code onto their iCloud Drive to build it.

There's a huge number of moving parts to get an MVP and we mustn't cannibalize desktop and laptop sales, but it seems like an obvious part of their services push AND "make the iPad a 'real' computer".

girvo2• 6 years ago

I’m not even sure the Mac Pro boxes are for devs. They seem pretty laser focused on Hollywood and similar for whatever reason, to my estimation anyway.

asiachick• 6 years ago

As someone who travels a lot and often has very bad internet no thank you

novok3• 6 years ago

Meh, I wish they said if you have one registered mac device already and are part of the apple developer program, you can legally run MacOS vmware on a non mac device with 4 VMs and just be done with it.

They will still get mac sales because corps want to be legal and not use hackintosh and all their developers are getting macbooks anyway. The vmware compute licences would be used for CI and for beefy compile machines to run xcode that will run on whatever thread ripper equivalent.

The cheap small shops would do hackintosh vmware either way, so they won't be missing much in sales in practice. MacStadium and huge iOS / macOS development must only represent what, 50k-100k unit sales? Which is a drop in the bucket for apple either way, but a very important partner in making good stuff for apple.

skohan• 6 years ago

How do you imagine the coding UI would work? It strikes me that coding is extremely keyboard dependent, and also a case where screen space is important, so it's like a worst case scenario for a soft keyboard.

whywhywhywhy• 6 years ago

We keep hearing every year from the Apple tech press how powerful the iPad Pro is, shouldn’t it just be able to handle compilation itself?

I say hearing because because the real world examples of this supposed power are few and far between.

flohofwoe• 6 years ago

A "Pro" device shouldn't have so many limitations built in, just give me a regular UNIX-y environment with a (pro-)user-friendly UI on top (meaning: just put macOS on the iPad Pro and attach a proper keyboard... wait a minute...).

teruakohatu• 6 years ago

The sad thing is I had a C compiler + UI designer for my ancient Palm device as a kid years ago, and the very simple Palm event loop (as best as I can remember) made development quite easy.

http://palmopensource.com/index.php?more=361

72deluxe• 6 years ago

Fascinating find, thanks! I miss the "new" feeling of technology prevalent with Palm. We seem to have settled into gaudy client/server apps, where the control/power is in the hands of the server.

dep_b• 6 years ago

There's so much Next-y stuff left in Interface Builder that you can forget about using anything but SwiftUI if they would port it. It was a separate application for most of it's life. The build chain already exists thanks to Playgrounds, so it's down to the file system / build settings / text editor part to be ported.

ksec• 6 years ago

I am willing to bet nearly half of their Mac Sales relies on Xcode. There are over 20M iOS Developers, likely more assuming not everyone publish on App Store.

Which is one reason why Mac's user number are growing ( slowly), developers have no choice but to buy a Mac if they want a pieces of the App Store revenue.

And one reason why Apple completely neglect the Mac, because it will continue to sell even if they have crappy keyboard and Touch Bar. I could only wish they do something about the keyboard after Oscar winning Director Taika Waititi blast about their keyboard.

inviromentalist• 6 years ago

Any chance Apple would make it possible to compile an iOS app without giving Apple any money?

I want to support my customers, but I don't want to support anti competitive FAANG

darklion• 6 years ago

Any chance Apple would make it possible to compile an iOS app without giving Apple any money?

Absolutely! It's called a "web application", and you can write them in a variety of languages, including compiled ones.

I want to support my customers, but I don't want to support anti competitive FAANG

It's weird, because English is my first language, but I have no idea what that sentence means. Perhaps you could elaborate?

FWIW, here's the closest I could come to translating it: "I want to write applications that natively run on hundreds of millions of devices, which development for, and use of, directly supports and props up [an anti-competitive FAANG], but somehow as long as I'm exempt from paying them a small annual fee, I'm morally and ethically OK with that."

city412• 6 years ago

FWIW I would expect the OP's real objection is having to buy a Mac to develop iOS apps, not the annual fee.

rickdg• 6 years ago

The web on iOS is deliberately gimped.

terminaljunkid• 6 years ago

If you mean not buying a Mac, I heard that is possible by virtualization of mac OS using some QEMU/KVM Hack.

I don't know if it needs modified builds of OS. if so, stay away from that..

misiti37802• 6 years ago

Is the get button disabled for anyone else in the mac store?

mayoff2• 6 years ago

You are probably not running macOS 10.15 Catalina.

misiti37802• 6 years ago

nope,thanks.

A4ET8a8uTh0• 6 years ago

I visited Apple store to get wife an Apple watch ( I tried to dissauade her, but it was what she wants ) and played with the Playground toys.

Neither my brother's nor my cousin's kids are ready age-wise, but it seemed like a ton of fun. I would love to be a kid today.

m0zg• 6 years ago

They'd probably be watching YouTube nonstop, like all the rest of the kids though. There are downsides to being a kid today, ones that kids don't even realize are downsides.

mark_l_watson4• 6 years ago

You might change your mind about the Apple Watch, especially with a data plan so you don’t have to carry your iPhone when going out and about.

Your wife will need AirPods to squeeze all the functionality out of her new Apple Watch; required for playing music, pod casts, audio books, and more pleasant phone conversations using the watch.

My wife and I have a ton of Apple gear and we agree that the Apple Watch is a game changing product. It is so convenient for a lot of supported things to not have to get your iPhone.

plg• 6 years ago

Honest question: to what extent is this a fancier-graphics version of Logo from the 1960s? (you know, the little turtle with which you can draw shapes, by using commands like pen down, pen up, move, turn, etc).

Does swift playgrounds teach one other stuff, in particular stuff relevant to the MacOS or iOS API?

madeofpalk• 6 years ago

Swift Playgrounds is essentially an interactive Swift REPL that ALSO ships with some prebuilt learning material, some of which is "fancy logo".

hhas012• 6 years ago

Swift Playgrounds is not a real REPL though as it re-evaluates the entire program after every code change†. While it nicely annotates the code with per-line results, program state is not persisted between edits and side-effectful operations are repeated each time. That seriously limits its real-world usefulness to little more than a cute toy.

Ironically, Swift does have a true REPL which you can invoke in Terminal (`swift`, unsurprisingly enough). That does persist state over the entire session while showing the output of each line, albeit with old-school CLI line editor. The Print bit really sucks though as it ignores `description` methods and does a full debug dump of complex structures every time.

(Plus, of course, users need to be comfortable finding their way around a 1970s shell, which Playgrounds’ audience won’t be.)

Two partial “REPL” implementations that could’ve been a single knock-it-out-the-park REPL had they bothered to consolidate and refine. Swift may be many things, but great at joined-up thinking it is not.

(†Unless they’ve changed that behavior since I last tried it. Probably not.)

hhas012• 6 years ago

Logo’s a Lisp. Swift’s an Algol. The latter are much more complex, and also much less expressive and customizable; alas, thanks to C they’re also firmly entrenched as the status quo. Logo emphasises compositional thinking; Swift Playgrounds algorithmic hoop-jumping.

Ironically, Apple did do a Lisp[-in-Algol-clothing] back in the 90s—Dylan—but abandoned it when NeXT took over. Shame. Closest thing since then was the “Objective” part in Objective-C, but that was always a bit smoke-n-mirrors (since it’s still C at the bottom) and is slowing going away now in any case.

I do not think Swift is a good K12 teaching language (it’s a nicer C++, roughly on-par with Java in complexity), but Apple’s goal here is to create lots of new (and preferably locked-in) iApp developers, not raise talented independent CS students†, so that’s not a problem for them.

Real-world Swift App development also gets varying degrees of ugly/tedious/painful when dealing with BSD/Foundation/AppKit/UIKit idioms and APIs due to the impedance mismatch between Swift and Obj-C worlds, so the sooner it has its own native APIs for everything the better. I don’t think SP can really prepare anyone for that tangled mess, though if/when SwiftUI is fully ready for primetime I can see SP boosting that. (Whether SwiftUI itself is particularly good remains to be seen.)

(† Mind, most K12 and college “computing science” courses nowadays are really “software engineering” and not really CS either; and even SE can be a stretch considering how much software today is garbage.)

dmix• 6 years ago

Is there a good age to start introducing stuff like this to kids? My niece is 7 and seems to have the personality that would be perfect for a programmer.

But I don't want to rush her into stuff like this when she's still a kid who should be having fun.

I was thinking around ~10 would be the ideal time. But I'm not a parent and know little about kids and childhood development.

Jtsummers• 6 years ago

The main thing is exposure + motivation. I learned to program about age 8 (not well, mind you, but that's when I started) with BASIC. We had a Tandy 1000 at home, and math textbooks had BASIC listings at the end of sections/chapters at the time (late 80s, early 90s). I was motivated to try the things out, my dad provided me access to the computer (showed me how to get to the command prompt, launch BASIC, open, save, and edit files, and run programs). He didn't do much beyond that (he hadn't programmed in 10 years or more, in college), but giving me access was the critical element.

If she's not interested in the motivating examples, like I was with the math-based examples, then she likely won't stay interested or engaged. So find something that she's interested in and can write her own programs (or program extensions) for. It could be more game-like stuff (controlling a character or bot on screen and having it do something), simulations, drawing (think Logo's Turtle Graphics or fractals), or something more physical (arduino + LEDs or servos controlling something).

And don't pressure her. Once she has access, and knows she can ask for help, if she's interested she'll pursue it. If she shows some interest but has little self-motivation, maybe keep providing little widgets or gizmos or games and inviting her to help out, but only occasionally.

GordonS• 6 years ago

My niece is 7 and seems to have the personality that would be perfect for a programmer

I've worked with all sorts of good programmers, but now that I think about it, I don't think there is a "type"?

Curious what you meant about this?

s_y_n_t_a_x2• 6 years ago

Some kids like puzzles more than others. Programming is like solving a puzzle.

RantyDave• 6 years ago

Start with scratch. Mine could do scratch at 7.

jacques_chester• 6 years ago

Apple have been hiring a number of developer relations and community relations folks from Kubernetes-land lately; my suspicion was that they were planning to create some kind of public platform or runtime service and wanted well-positioned ambassadors.

Maybe this is it.

ztjio• 6 years ago

No. This is just a macOS port of an app that has been on iOS for years now.

polyomino• 6 years ago

  Animations introduce each new coding concept at a high level before you dive into the puzzles

This sentence says the opposite of what is meant to most non-technical people.

elpakal• 6 years ago

yea but is it written in Swift is what i wanna know

favorited2• 6 years ago

If you download it and run `nm /Applications/Playgrounds.app/Contents/MacOS/Playgrounds | grep "_\$s"` from Terminal, you can see there is lots of Swift in there.

matthewhartmans• 6 years ago

I'm still waiting for Apple to update Xcode to not include every single SDK for iPhone so the updates can reduce to 700mb instead of 6GB.

Xcode should have an SDK download manager so you get to choose which iOS version you want to install, rather than ship them all in Xcode.

DagAgren• 6 years ago

They ship like one or two? If you want older ones, you need to go to the download manager to get them.

If you already had them installed, they remain available. You're probably getting confused by that.

elevenoh2• 6 years ago

Anyone else here unpopularly wish they could write typescript/js & compile directly to native iOS machine lang?

I love prototypal inheritance & JS' syntax.

I don't enjoy the swift I'm doing now nearly as much as JS/TS.

Macha• 6 years ago

Javascript (and probably by extension Typescript) are too dynamic to really compile down to machine code while still retaining all features. The best you could do would be something Cythonish where every second line gets converted to a call to PyObject_blah. It's not clear that that would actually perform better than a modern JIT engine

In which case you've just invented a less portable way of doing electron type apps.

s_y_n_t_a_x2• 6 years ago

There's AssemblyScript (a strict subset of TS that compiles to WASM)

hombre_fatal3• 6 years ago

Swift and JS/TS are practically interchangeable compared to the high learning curve of actually using UIKit/Cocoa/CoreData/Xcode/etc and building applications with it.

I don't think language syntax is very consequential, especially Swift vs JS which really aren't all that far apart. What I yearn for when I build mobile clients is the ability to bring my own abstraction like I can on the web. Instead we're stuck with old-school overly-OOP abstractions on mobile without any truly compelling alternatives.

Like, the whole ViewController + delegation abstraction feels like using Backbone.js in 2020. SwiftUI is one step in the right direction, at least.

elevenoh2• 6 years ago

we're stuck with old-school overly-OOP abstractions on mobile without any truly compelling alternatives.

Agree. It's odd.

Angostura• 6 years ago

Yuck - needs 10.15

mime33292• 6 years ago

Wasn't it released in 2016 ? Why is it top of hacker news today?

jayrhynas2• 6 years ago

They recently released it on macOS (via a Catalyst port of the iPad app)

mime33292• 6 years ago

All right! Thanks a lot. I was confused with their home page https://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/ "Learn serious code on your iPad." I guess it's just not up to date.

Swift Playgrounds for macOS

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