Logo’s a Lisp. Swift’s an Algol. The latter are much more complex, and also much less expressive and customizable; alas, thanks to C they’re also firmly entrenc

Logo’s a Lisp. Swift’s an Algol. The latter are much more complex, and also much less expressive and customizable; alas, thanks to C they’re also firmly entrenched as the status quo. Logo emphasises compositional thinking; Swift Playgrounds algorithmic hoop-jumping. Ironically, Apple did do a Lisp[-in-Algol-clothing] back in the 90s—Dylan—but abandoned it when NeXT took over. Shame. Closest thing since then was the “Objective” part in Objective-C, but that was always a bit smoke-n-mirrors (since it’s still C at the bottom) and is slowing going away now in any case. I do not think Swift is a good K12 teaching language (it’s a nicer C++, roughly on-par with Java in complexity), but Apple’s goal here is to create lots of new (and preferably locked-in) iApp developers, not raise talented independent CS students†, so that’s not a problem for them. Real-world Swift App development also gets varying degrees of ugly/tedious/painful when dealing with BSD/Foundation/AppKit/UIKit idioms and APIs due to the impedance mismatch between Swift and Obj-C worlds, so the sooner it has its own native APIs for everything the better. I don’t think SP can really prepare anyone for that tangled mess, though if/when SwiftUI is fully ready for primetime I can see SP boosting that. (Whether SwiftUI itself is particularly good remains to be seen.) -- († Mind, most K12 and college “computing science” courses nowadays are really “software engineering” and not really CS either; and even SE can be a stretch considering how much software today is garbage.)