Hubris ⇥ theverge.com

Ashley Carman and Frank Bi of the Verge wrote an article praising Apple’s introduction of Swift Playgrounds on the iPad, but warning that it’s all a big trap:

But most importantly, Swift Playgrounds fits into Apple’s proprietary business efforts as it has a vested interest in teaching kids to code in Swift; apps built in Swift only work on iOS devices. With Swift Playgrounds, Apple is hoping its programming language will be the gateway to coding that encourages a new generation of App Store developers.

I know what you’re thinking. And Carman and Bi address it the very next sentence:

That being said, we should note that Swift is open source, so it’s possible it’ll be more widely adopted on Linux and eventually show up on Android.

Apple is trying to lock kids into building using a totally open language, much in the same way that Netscape tried to lock kids into using HTML. The hubris is overwhelming. Not Apple’s — the Verge’s.

Hat-tip to Matt Birchler.