What it is: Apple created an official Swift programming course for high school teachers.
A year ago, Apple introduced their new programming language for OS X, iOS, and watchOS development called Swift. The main idea behind Swift was to simplify their previous programming language, Objective-C, and add additional modern programming features. Given a choice between learning the much simpler and powerful Swift or the clumsier, more complicated Objective-C, it’s obvious that the whole programming world is going to shift towards Swift.
To help encourage the rapid adoption of Swift, Apple has created an official Swift programming course geared for high school teachers to use. The goal is to provide a standard Swift programming curriculum so teachers don’t have to reinvent a programming course by themselves. Instead, they can use the Apple provided materials and focus on helping their students learn Swift. Naturally, to use Swift, schools will need to buy Macintosh computers. That means high school students can start learning iOS app development using Swift.
Seeding high school teachers with free Swift programming courses will only increase the number of Swift programmers in the world. As more people learn and use Swift, more people will continue focusing on OS X, iOS, and watchOS development instead of focusing their time on rival operating systems like Android and Windows. Even though Apple open sourced Swift to run on Linux and others can port Swift to run on Android or Windows if they want, the bulk of Swift programmers will likely stick with OS X, iOS, and watchOS development. That increases the number of developers for Apple products, the number of apps for those products, and the number of customers who want products that offer the greatest software library around.
In other words, Swift will not only become the dominant programming language for Apple, but it will also help Apple products dominate the market as well. As more people use Macintosh computers in school, they’ll likely continue using them in college and in the workplace. This represents a growing base of users for all types of Apple products.
Apple’s free Swift high school programming course is just one more way that Apple is helping grow their market share in ways that pay off years later. With the continuing growing interest in Apple products, you can expect Apple to continue dominating the mobile and wearable computer market and steadily grow their Macintosh market share at the same time.
How come Microsoft isn’t offering free programming courses for getting students to learn C# or Visual Basic.NET? With the computer market so competitive, every little advantage helps and Apple is simply moving ahead while rivals are content to wait for others to promote their technology and then wonder what happens when they don’t.
To read more about Apple’s Swift highs school programming curriculum, click here.