[devindotcom]

How do you see it as revolutionizing programming education? I'm pretty ignorant in this area, but it seems like a very high level language that abstracts a ton of stuff - and very platform specific too if I'm not mistaken. Is that really where we want people to start? I would have thought either a highly graphical language with buttons and widgets for early education, then moving onto platform-agnostic stuff like java and obj c would be the thing to do. Maybe you're talking about later stuff, college and beyond, which makes sense - at that point specialization to this extent seems like a good idea. But as I said, I'm pretty out of touch.

[jimbokun]

I work with someone who previously was a college professor teaching computer science. The university decided to standardize on Mac and iOS hardware, and teach how to program iOS apps as a way to make the CS program more popular.

Trouble was, teaching the entire XCode and Objective C tool chain was not a particularly easy entry point for learning how to develop programs.

(Maybe there were other prerequisite programs, but still, you need to understand C to really understand why a lot of things are the way they are in Objective C, in addition to message passing and object orientation, pointers, and other quirky stuff in order to really wrap your head around iOS development.)

Swift and the corresponding tools look like they would have been a godsend for teaching that class. A more practical way to get students started writing programs they can actually run on their phone.

[kayoone]

Swift doesn't look more high level than other scripting languages, but higher level than Obj-C yes, but also much more modern with a good toolset which will probably boost dev productivity.

[dazonic]

Live preview. Kids changing a value and seeing their widget move differently or change colour instantly, that can be magical.