jasenj1

I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around how Apple can sell a significantly upgraded iPhone with a $160 pair of earbuds for the same price as the previous generation iPhone which came with $29 EarPods. The profit margins on something don't feel quite right.

nolamacguy said:

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

Because the touchy-feely video had people gushing about how they're going to change the world now that they know how to code. Umm... Swift Playground is not "really" coding. It's tiny sketches in a tightly controlled environment. Doodles vs blueprints. Yes, it may help people learn some very simple basics and see if they grok coding. But they'll have a long way to go before being a software developer.

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.