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Comment by zubairq | Hacker News Reader

They influenced swift and a whole bunch of other interactive IDEs with the research they did. Don’t use iPhone or Android if you don’t want to use these new languages

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> [...] if you don’t want to use these new languages

I'm stumped – where is that suddenly coming from now? When did I say anything about not wanting to use Swift?

Light table/eve was one of the influences for swift

The only quote I can find about swift and Light Table is this:

> The Xcode Playgrounds feature and REPL were a personal passion of mine, to make programming more interactive and approachable. The Xcode and LLDB teams have done a phenomenal job turning crazy ideas into something truly great. Playgrounds were heavily influenced by Bret Victor's ideas, by Light Table and by many other interactive systems.

From: http://nondot.org/sabre/

And that just mentions "Playgrounds", which seems to be some sort of editor application written in Swift. It did not inspire Swift itself.

And also, Swift hardly "changed the whole industry", as far as I know.

Nice link by the way. I was more referring to this published by The Atlantic (incidently owned by Steve Jobs family trust):

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/savin...

https://www.recode.net/2017/7/28/16055162/laurene-powell-job...

Sorry this thread flamed up a bit. I was just trying to express my gratitude to the Eve guys

No worries, I understand and have gratitude towards the folks working on it as well. But I don't agree with that they changed the entire industry.

The second link you posted mentions nothing of Swift. The first one has the following quote about Swift:

> The default language for making new iPhone and Mac apps, called Swift, was developed by Apple from the ground up to support an environment, called Playgrounds, that was directly inspired by Light Table.

Which seems to agree with the previous quote I posted. Light Table inspired Playgrounds, not Swift.

yeah, good point. Sorry I said Swift, but I meant Playgrounds. I guess I see Playgrounds as the interactive IDE part of SWIFT, like Visual Studio is for C++, so I don't really separate the two in my mind. Anyway, we can agree to disagree on the other point, I just like the discussion :)

Kickstarter uses “Swift Playgrounds for iterative development and styling. Most major screens in the app get a corresponding playground where we can see a wide variety of devices, languages and data in real time.” (The Kickstarter iOS app is open-source [0]; see their playgrounds [1].)

Here’s [2] Brandon Williams’ talk Finding Happiness in Functional Programming (starts at “Playground-Driven Development,” but I suggest watching the whole talk), [3] the Swift Talk episode “Playground-Driven Development” (Brandon Williams and Chris Eidhof), and [4] the Swift Talk episode “Test-Driven Reactive Programming” (Lisa Luo and Chris) wherein they build a small but complete PoC all within Playgrounds.

There are many more examples, such as Chris Lattner’s own Dynamic Member Lookup proposal [5] Python Interop playground [6] and Reactive Swift’s getting started playgrounds [7].

Playgrounds are very much entangled with Swift’s core (value proposition).

[0] https://github.com/kickstarter/ios-oss

[1] https://github.com/kickstarter/ios-oss/tree/master/Kickstart...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0VaIKK2ijM&feature=youtu.be...

[3] https://talk.objc.io/episodes/S01E51-playground-driven-devel...

[4] https://talk.objc.io/episodes/S01E53-test-driven-reactive-pr...

[5] https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/master/proposa...

[6] https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-Mo... (download the attachment)

[7] https://github.com/ReactiveCocoa/ReactiveSwift/tree/master/R...

Wow, great set of links, thanks, I will check them out.

Thanks a lot for the comment, gives me a new view of Swift. Didn't understand Playground was so embedded with the language and/or vice-versa. Very interesting.

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