Apple CEO Tim Cook pops up in Canada to promote 'Everyone Can Code,' visit Shopify [u]
Following his European tour last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook on Monday showed up at an Apple store in Toronto to discuss the importance of coding in education, talk up the company's Swift programming language and visit a few local developers.
Source: Tim Cook via Twitter
The trip, which found Cook at Apple Eaton Centre, marks the executive's first visit to the Great White North as company CEO, reports The Globe and Mail. Late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs visited Canada in an official capacity in the late 1980s, but the country is often overlooked as executives concentrate on other key markets.
In Toronto, Cook had a chance to speak with a group of students from Scarborough, Ont., who were visiting the Apple store to attend an "Everyone Can Code" workshop. Apple's custom curriculum exposes younger students to mobile app coding through fun projects based on the Swift coding language.
"Swift came out of the fundamental recognition that coding languages were too geeky. Most students would look at them and say, 'That's not for me," Cook said. "That's not our view. Our view is that coding is a horizontal skill like your native languages or mathematics, so we wanted to design a programming language that is as easy to learn as our products are to use."
Beyond pushing Apple's educational initiatives, Cook was in Canada to thank the company's regional team, as well as the 120,000 developers, designers, entrepreneurs and other professionals who contribute to the iOS and App Store ecosystems.
"Canada is an extremely important market for us. We have a great team in Canada," Cook said. "I want to do everything I can do to highlight their innovation, their companies and their work, because it is a critical part of the entire user experience. I wanted to come say thank you."
Cook also met with employees of Canadian e-commerce company Shopify, which is experimenting with augmented reality shopping features built using ARKit in iOS 11.
Cook's Canadian trip follows a similar visit to the UK, where the executive discussed the benefits of technology both in and out of the classroom. That meeting was time to coincide with Apple's recent launch of the "Everyone Can Code" curriculum in a number of European schools.
Update: Cook also spent time with Canadian singer Daniel Caesar, who was also featured in promotional images of the new Apple Music for Artists tool. A photo of the pair sitting in a music studio was posted to Cook's Twitter profile on Monday.
Source: Tim Cook via Twitter
The trip, which found Cook at Apple Eaton Centre, marks the executive's first visit to the Great White North as company CEO, reports The Globe and Mail. Late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs visited Canada in an official capacity in the late 1980s, but the country is often overlooked as executives concentrate on other key markets.
In Toronto, Cook had a chance to speak with a group of students from Scarborough, Ont., who were visiting the Apple store to attend an "Everyone Can Code" workshop. Apple's custom curriculum exposes younger students to mobile app coding through fun projects based on the Swift coding language.
"Swift came out of the fundamental recognition that coding languages were too geeky. Most students would look at them and say, 'That's not for me," Cook said. "That's not our view. Our view is that coding is a horizontal skill like your native languages or mathematics, so we wanted to design a programming language that is as easy to learn as our products are to use."
Beyond pushing Apple's educational initiatives, Cook was in Canada to thank the company's regional team, as well as the 120,000 developers, designers, entrepreneurs and other professionals who contribute to the iOS and App Store ecosystems.
"Canada is an extremely important market for us. We have a great team in Canada," Cook said. "I want to do everything I can do to highlight their innovation, their companies and their work, because it is a critical part of the entire user experience. I wanted to come say thank you."
Cook also met with employees of Canadian e-commerce company Shopify, which is experimenting with augmented reality shopping features built using ARKit in iOS 11.
Cook's Canadian trip follows a similar visit to the UK, where the executive discussed the benefits of technology both in and out of the classroom. That meeting was time to coincide with Apple's recent launch of the "Everyone Can Code" curriculum in a number of European schools.
Update: Cook also spent time with Canadian singer Daniel Caesar, who was also featured in promotional images of the new Apple Music for Artists tool. A photo of the pair sitting in a music studio was posted to Cook's Twitter profile on Monday.
Comments
The day AI progresses to the point we can begin "programming" computers via voice commands is the day "most people can code." I think of it as using a WYSIWYG web design tool to get my creativity on the web without having to resort to HTML or JavaScript coding. It's the superiority of 1984 Mac 128k's GUI versus text "code" of DOS or CP/M. Computers need to get more powerful in terms of their software easy-of-use to empower more people to achieve things that were once unthinkable. And in the end that won't transform us into the Bynars of Star Trek. Advanced computing technology should help push human beings to a higher level without changing us into a computer.
As our digital lifestyle will only grow, the sector and demand for coders will continue. The US and Apple itself was lucky to be ground zero fo the personal computing revolution, so there is no reason not to leverage this prime mover advantage. We lead global entertainment, why not computing and software?
There is no down side here.
Let’s stop teaching physics in high school, cuz, well, not everyone is going to become a physicist.
Also noticed Cook was at the Leafs game with Kypreos (via Twitter).
Did you just copy-paste your own post from another thread?
Do you plan to do this every time there is a similar story? You know, like Sog wanting Apple to buy Shopify, or FreeRange's recent rants about closed threads?
You end up with a cr*p website. I'm not sure that makes a good analogy.
I'm not sure we really do this anymore, sadly... or have for a long time. Even back when I was off to college, it was about learning XYZ so you could make $ (which was generally a quite inflated projection). But, universities sure have lots of pretty new buildings while people are up to their eyeballs in student debt. Good in concept; very poor execution.
The fact remains that the campaign slogan emphasizes "EVERYONE CAN CODE." Schools don't promote other subjects using the same language, which is my point. Imagine if a school said, "EVERYONE CAN UNDERSTAND ADVANCED CALCULUS!" I certainly haven't seen Calc advertised that way before, and there is no mystery as to why not.
To code (verb) means you understand, on some level, how to code. But not "everyone" knows how to do that, even if they've been exposed to code in an educational setting. My comments are therefore merely an observation of factual reality, not a call for people to stop teaching code. We need to teach coding even in Kindergarten! But the fact remains that not "everyone" can code. Perhaps most people could if they really tried, but like I said in my previous post, not everyone is built the same.
We need greater advances in coding tech to get even more people to code. What differentiates machine language, assembly, basic, and SWIFT? Higher versus Lower level languages. Machine language is at the lowest level and is, unsurprisingly, the most difficult to learn and use. Higher level languages are easier, relatively speaking. Tim Cook likened the ease of learning SWIFT to the the ease of using a Mac. I disagree with that. My mother can use a Mac but she cannot code. But if coding could be assisted with AI, as I said in my previous post, then perhaps even my mother could learn to code. Again, that was my point -- how to gather more people into the coding fold. SWIFT is an improvement over some existing programming languages, but again, your mother isn't going to dive into it because it's just so fun and easy. But if I could write code with an AI assistant -- ah, that changes everything. Again, that was my point in my previous post, for those of you who missed it. There's much more work to do in order to get "everyone" to code.
I'm not the only person speaking of AI in coding:
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/ai-write-code-microsoft
and
https://www.inverse.com/article/37191-star-trek-discovery-computer-code-windows
"...code could start writing itself in way as well if we make progress on A.I."
"I agree self-writing code will become more of a thing..."
“Anyone can code” is a great campaign because no one is confusing it for “everyone must code”.
BTW it’s Swift, not SWIFT — not an acronym.
Second of all no. This is common everywhere and your conclusion that it’s responsible for bugs is not fact. Revision control branches the code into different streams for different work items, projects, bugs, etc. There is a process to integrate it back so it’s not as if they’re just checking in their outdated Bluetooth library on top of the stable production branch every time. “Oops! Did I just overwrite your stuff? Sorry!” Nope, not how software engineering works.
https://math.dartmouth.edu/undergraduate/majors/why-major/evennonmajors.pdf
The equivalent to 'Everyone can understand advanced calculus' would be something like 'Everyone can understand dependency injection'. Something as basic as addition is useful in everyday situations. Something as basic as an Excel formula is similarly useful the more that things become digital.
It's the same with other digital skills like movie editing, this is a skill that is useful to a broad range of people. Most people will never advance beyond cropping movies but that's enough to be useful at some point and that's all it needs to be. If all someone ever does is make a single web page for their art portfolio and it gets them a job then it was worth investing their time in.
Learning a coding language may not be necessary in the long-term. There are visual ways to do the same thing that are more approachable. One example would be Apple's Automator where you put blocks together or Photoshop's action recording. It generally comes back to text because it's the most compatible data format that is the most extensible to accommodate future needs. JSON data format would probably work because this is a representation of objects. There can be a visual editor that formats object structures and allows them to be transparently compiled in any language behind the scenes.
re: AI - I think this is mostly baloney. I can see AI or ML assisting in various ways, like helping correct syntax or knowing a function call I might not have on top of my mind or such, but it isn't going to write the code as that is a creative process (something AI can't do). It's kind of like the difference between spell/grammar-checking and writing.
A hundred years after we are all dead and gone, I assure you AI of that future will be vastly different and more advanced than today. I am not suggesting it would replace a human being. But even today we are talking about how AI can assist people. Heck, we are moving fast toward trusting it to drive us around on the open road, without any human intervention.
So rather than defend the way things are today (which one is inclined to do if they are a coder today, emerged in the languages of today), we should be open to what the future will bring. I am open to that, and it is in that future day the current Apple slogan "everyone can code" will be a far more accurate statement. Coding should be taught today and I think Swift (or SWIFT -- I defy grammar Nazis!) is an excellent language that should be taught even in Kindergarten. But I think some of those young people learning Swift today will grow to become the people who see deficiencies in it and they will work all the harder on improving AI & ML with the aim of helping even more people interact with computers on a "programming" level. We need visionaries who advance tech along side the coders who make those advancements possible.
Here's to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They're not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can't do is ignore them.
Because they change things.
They push the human race forward.
While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think
they can change the world, are the ones who do.
As for 'moving fast toward trusting' so-called self-driving vehicles, that's more a sales job and politics than actual capability. Maybe we shouldn't be so fast forward in trusting hocus-pocus with our lives.