Apple brings coding to the iPad with Swift Playground

Introduced as a new way for children to learn how to code, Apple will bring its Swift programming language to iPad with Swift Playground, a touch-friendly way for beginners to grasp the basics.

In an onstage demonstration, Apple showed how it plans to "engage and motivate learners" with a series of lessons on how to write for Swift. Users learn the basics of programming by moving an onscreen character with code, solving puzzles and accomplishing goals in a game-like scenario.

When using Swift Playground, commands appear at the bottom like QuickType suggestions intended for code. In an onstage demonstration, Apple showed how users could move a character and pick up gems in a simplified way to teach the basics of code.

Advanced coding is also available in Swift Playground, with one demo called "Physics Emoji" showing a creation where emojis move on the screen based on code that modifies virtual gravity on the screen.

Apple also created an all-new coding keyboard for Swift Playground, offering easy access to the letters and symbols coders are most likely to use.

Swift Playground will ship this fall with iOS 10, available in the iOS App Store. The free app will be available to test in the developer beta, starting today, and the public beta set to launch in July.

74 Comments

timbit 330 comments · 12 Years

About 8 years ago

This looks really neat! I'm going to learn some coding :)

jasenj1 900 comments · 21 Years

I guess I'm old and jaded. As a professional software developer I find it really hard to believe coding on the iPad will produce anything "real". Maybe it will give people a taste of breaking a problem down into steps, working with picky syntax, and introduce some other basic software production concepts. But compared to XCode, Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ, and other "real" development environments, Swift Playground seems almost delusional.

jSnively 396 comments · 13 Years

jasenj1 said:

I guess I'm old and jaded. As a professional software developer I find it really hard to believe coding on the iPad will produce anything "real". Maybe it will give people a taste of breaking a problem down into steps, working with picky syntax, and introduce some other basic software production concepts. But compared to XCode, Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ, and other "real" development environments, Swift Playground seems almost delusional.

That's exactly the whole point of it, it's not meant as a replacement for your standard development environment. It's a learning tool for people who don't know anything about coding with a bend towards K12 and below.

larrya 608 comments · 13 Years

jasenj1 said:

I guess I'm old and jaded. As a professional software developer I find it really hard to believe coding on the iPad will produce anything "real". Maybe it will give people a taste of breaking a problem down into steps, working with picky syntax, and introduce some other basic software production concepts. But compared to XCode, Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ, and other "real" development environments, Swift Playground seems almost delusional.

I think of this as a huge leap forward from Logo (are they still using that?), not a replacement for professional tools.

nolamacguy 4750 comments · 10 Years

jasenj1 said:

I guess I'm old and jaded. As a professional software developer I find it really hard to believe coding on the iPad will produce anything "real". Maybe it will give people a taste of breaking a problem down into steps, working with picky syntax, and introduce some other basic software production concepts. But compared to XCode, Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ, and other "real" development environments, Swift Playground seems almost delusional.

yep, youre old and jaded. as an enterprise dev myself it was obvious and apparent that Swift Playground is a teaching tool. you know, because they call it a playground, and because they said it's a teaching tool for children & beginners.

how and why on earth you would be comparing it to Xcode is a mystery.