Playgrounds are good

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of times (Protocols & Named Loops) in the past few days I’ve needed to write and run a couple of tiny C or C++ snippets, and I’ve acutely felt the lack of Swift Playgrounds for it. It occurred to me that Playgrounds has been instrumental in my enjoyment of learning Swift - it’s just a bit magic to grab the closest device and noodle out an idea or to make sure I’ve understood a new concept.

In a conversation between Chris Lattner and Paul Hudson I’ve listened to recently, they discuss the value of Playgrounds and the excellent Swift book in bringing the community along from Objective C. I could not agree more about the value of these two.

As an alternative, I downloaded C Language app for the iPad. This seems like a reasonable editor that uses an online compiler - it worked for my purpose although it wasn’t real snappy.

A couple of alternatives in the app store mentioned the ability to compile offline - which didn’t make sense to me until I pressed build on this one and realised it was using a server somewhere to do that work. So this may well not be the best one for AUD5.

I was amazed to find heaps of online compilers for things which would have done the job just as well. I’ve bookmarked this one which does all sorts of languages including C and Swift.

Chris Lattner

Wed, 03 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Thank you YouTube algorithm for this recommendation - Chris Lattner, the main author of Swift (amongst other things including LVM) chatting with Lex Fridman. Ignore the clickbait title. There is a good, brief discussion about the tradeoffs in value vs references types which is a topic I’ve been thinking a bit about this week.

Also some interesting comments about how a language delivers it’s complexity. Chris gives the funny example of what “hello world” looks like in Swift vs C++. Here’s Swift: Print("Hello world"), here’s C++:

#include <iostream>

int main() {
 std::cout << "Hello World!";
 return 0;
}

Especially when part of my interest is in exciting kids in programming, that’s a stark difference. Swift does go on to do the hard things - it’s used for native apps and has some of the great modern language features, but the simple things are easy. I am very happy with the idea of Swift (especially plus Playgrounds) being a smooth introduction to coding. Less so with SwiftUI - that gets complicated quickly when things go wrong.

Chris-Lattner on blog.iankulin.com

Playgrounds are good

Chris Lattner