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Does anyone know if playground 4 will support exporting your code as a standalone app for local use?
I think it's unknown whether Swift Playgrounds on an iPad compiles Swift all the way to arm64 machine code, or is just an interpreter of Swift compiled LLVM intermediate language tokens. If the latter, then you will probably eventually need to export your Swift code from Playgrounds to Apple's new Xcode cloud continuous integration service, before importing your Apple compiled app back to your iPad for standalone local use.
 
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Glad this will still come out. I looked for it when iPadOS 15 came out and when I didn't see it, I just figured Apple was going to brush it under the rug and pretend it never was mentioned at WWDC.
This is what I thought Too. I was looking forward to this.
 
It's good to teach this at a young age because then it becomes second nature, like learning multiple foreign languages and becoming fluent in them.
If you want a second "foreign language" for your daughter, I suggest the Wolfram Language on a Raspberry Pi -- perhaps running on the turnkey Raspberry Pi 400. As discussed in the 2016 SF film Arrival, the languages we use may well alter the pathways of connection in our brain. And, BTW, those beautiful graphics in Arrival of the Heptapod language were created using the Wolfram Language by Stephen Wolfram's son Christopher. ?

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My seven year old daughter started using Swift Playgrounds the other day and really likes it so far. Looking forward to her first app! It's good to teach this at a young age because then it becomes second nature, like learning multiple foreign languages and becoming fluent in them. The mind is an incredible thing at this age.
At seven? At seven I was pulling a wooden duck on a wheels.
I am over 40 now and almost mastered the pulling of a wooden duck on the wheels.
Programming next.
 
I think it's unknown whether Swift Playgrounds on an iPad compiles Swift all the way to arm64 machine code, or is just an interpreter of Swift compiled LLVM intermediate language tokens. If the latter, then you will probably eventually need to export your Swift code from Playgrounds to Apple's new Xcode cloud continuous integration service, before importing your Apple compiled app back to your iPad for standalone local use.
Playgrounds on the iPad as well as within Xcode are runtime interpreted. I have not tried Playgrounds 4 or in fact used Playgrounds on the iPad in quite a while. The main reason I quit using it was because, at the time, I couldn't load an iPad Playground file into an Xcode Playground on the Mac. I'm assuming that's still the case and hoping that Playgrounds 4 changes that.

Of course Swift code is just code and we can always copy that text itself and move it about.
 
Does anybody know how to promote an appeal to Apple about adding an option in iPadOS to remap the top-left-key to function as Escape key?! Key remapping on iPads is available for quite a while, why not add yet another one?
Typing source code in any code editor without a physical Escape key is at least frustrating.
I know there's a keyboard combo to send the "Esc" signal, but has anybody used these weird symbols ever?!

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Seven is a normal age to get into programming. I was copying the games out my magazine into my Amiga and fixing the bugs by seven(I started at six).
While that might be true for you, it is definitely not the norm.

At 6 years old in Denmark you are first starting to learn written numbers and the letters in the alphabet in school but not for structuring meaningful sentences.

Your parents must have started you early by themselves perhaps? ?
 
I always wonder about trying to turn everyone into programmers. It’s a career path and something that needs time and focus. Making it more accessible to youngsters is great but it has to “float your boat”!
 
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Apple is literally trying very hard to reinvent their existing wheels so that things could be forced to be “Apple way”. I won’t be surprised for apple to retire Xcode at one point and slowly but surely push people into coding in swift playground.
Yes, I think this is where it’s going
 
Apple is literally trying very hard to reinvent their existing wheels so that things could be forced to be “Apple way”. I won’t be surprised for apple to retire Xcode at one point and slowly but surely push people into coding in swift playground.

I think it's the other way around. Swift Playgrounds is making coding more accessible to children, who become inspired to acquire a Mac to learn advanced programming in Xcode.

They can't completely replace Xcode, especially for game developers who need lower-level languages like C and C++ for extreme graphics performance.
 
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The first time I saw a computer, I was about 10. Atari :)
First PC (386) when I was 15 :)
386 hehe 12 i think . turbo2 . it long way 40 mb hardisk 8 mb ram ? .
if swift playground can direct compile much easier to customer because you know customer la . one 1 mm change or color ?
 
While that might be true for you, it is definitely not the norm.

At 6 years old in Denmark you are first starting to learn written numbers and the letters in the alphabet in school but not for structuring meaningful sentences.

Your parents must have started you early by themselves perhaps? ?
I was 8 when I started learning programming in BBC BASIC on an Acorn Electron back in the mid 80s. My mum had obviously seen the future and done evening classes in BASIC programming which I then stole the course notes for and rattled through the entire course on my own over a couple of weekends. That got me hooked, and despite having dropped out of a Software Engineering degree in the second year I've now been a professional programmer for nearly 25 years.
 
Apple is literally trying very hard to reinvent their existing wheels so that things could be forced to be “Apple way”. I won’t be surprised for apple to retire Xcode at one point and slowly but surely push people into coding in swift playground.
One big reason they can't retire the Xcode toolchain is that Apple is pushing using Metal for graphics and GPU compute, and the GPU is a larger and larger portion of Apple Silicon chips. Metal requires something more like a C++ compiler to build graphics intensive game, ML and AR apps. Also, C is still used in the low-level portions of iOS and macOS hardware drivers, and other real-time Mach subsystems.
 
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I think it's the other way around. Swift Playgrounds is making coding more accessible to children, who become inspired to acquire a Mac to learn advanced programming in Xcode.

They can't completely replace Xcode, especially for game developers who need lower-level languages like C and C++ for extreme graphics performance.
But then Apple can make Apple Silicon so insanely powerful that low-level language becomes more or less obsolete for everyone other than macOS developers themselves, or not even macOS developers would touch C/C++, similarly to how modern machines (as low las RasPI) can run BASIC at a far faster speed than Commodore 64 could ever run highly optimized Machine Language. Swift Playground lowers the coding barrier, but at the same time Apple can slowly hide lots of "what matters now" and eventually turn next generation coder into a group of talented programmers who don't truly understand much of the fundamentals of why programming language works the way it is today.
 
One big reason they can't retire the Xcode toolchain is that Apple is pushing using Metal for graphics and GPU compute, and the GPU is a larger and larger portion of Apple Silicon chips. Metal requires something more like a C++ compiler to build graphics intensive game, ML and AR apps. Also, C is still used in the low-level portions of iOS and macOS hardware drivers, and other real-time Mach subsystems.
Sure, but if the chip is so insanely powerful that even poorly optimized code written in higher-level languages can run at amazing speed nonetheless, who cares? I believe some would say "don't spend time on debugging code, spend time on debugging your idea and thought process, let those who love to debug code debug code". Apple Silicon's amazing benchmark score I think is pretty telling phasing out C/C++ from mainstream programming could eventually be the trend of future programming.
 
Does anybody know how to promote an appeal to Apple about adding an option in iPadOS to remap the top-left-key to function as Escape key?! Key remapping on iPads is available for quite a while, why not add yet another one?
Typing source code in any code editor without a physical Escape key is at least frustrating.
I know there's a keyboard combo to send the "Esc" signal, but has anybody used these weird symbols ever?!
Pressing CMD + the ~ key you've circled is the keyboard combo for ESC. That said, Apple has been waging a silent war against the Escape key for some time now. They've finally admitted they were wrong and put it back as a physical key on the new MacBook Pros and it's even sized up a bit so more friendly. That said, the iPad keyboards really need it. Just working in Excel on the iPad can be maddening without it.

But feel free to email Apple or submit your feedback, give Tim a tweet... whatever. many of us have. They seem to have gotten the message for the MBP, now iPad we can only hope.
 
My seven year old daughter started using Swift Playgrounds the other day and really likes it so far. Looking forward to her first app! It's good to teach this at a young age because then it becomes second nature, like learning multiple foreign languages and becoming fluent in them. The mind is an incredible thing at this age.
I wish something like Playgrounds existed when I was a kid. That said, I taught myself BASIC on the Apple II when I was in maybe 4th grade. My dad brought home the brand new Apple II for Christmas that year. I have an uncle who was a math teacher at the time, now long retired, but he was a computer geek back then. He gave me a copy of Apple's BASIC language reference and programming guide he got from the university, said it was like $50 for it to actually buy from a computer store at the time. So I plugged away and figured it out. Was making simple text apps and games, choose your own adventure type stuff in no time. I took a C programming class at the local community college when I was 14. Computer Science and Civil Engineering in college and lots of self-taught everything since.

I started my son with Playgrounds on the iPad Pro when Playgrounds first came out. Super buggy initially but he learned a lot and we had fun with it. He's made a couple simple iOS apps, but seems to have lost interest in coding for now. ...Teenager with other things on his brain.
 
Sure, but if the chip is so insanely powerful that even poorly optimized code written in higher-level languages can run at amazing speed nonetheless, who cares?
The people who care about battery life (on things like apps for the Apple Watch and iPhone minis), and the people who pay the power bills for those huge data centers (where the annual power bill can run to more than the cost of the all the servers in them.) Thus contributing to global warming.

But yes, if you don't care about battery life, poorly written javascript can run more than 1000X faster on an M1 than hand-coded 68000 assembly on a Mac Plus. But don't try to do a low-latency AR app for Apple future AR goggles using either.
 
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Consumer level home computers did not exist until I was about 20yo. I wrote my first code on a TRS-80 in college to calculate moving average stock prices for our investing club display in our annual open house.
 
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