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Comment by indigo747 | Hacker News Reader

As a counter-anecdote, the built in Ruby interpreter in Mac OS X Tiger was the way I learned to program and how I got interested in programming. I don't think a bare Ruby interpreter is the best way to get into programming, but Apple hasn't been great at encouraging programming among kids. As a kid, its development tools were totally baffling, where Ruby was much easier to understand.

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> Apple hasn't been great at encouraging programming among kids

You should check out what they’ve been doing for years with Swift Playgrounds on the iPad

But that's teaching a new generation of coders a set of tools designed only for Apple. Ruby (Python etc) are open and easily available on other platforms, Swift may be in the future but it isn't now.

How about using a web browser with JavaScript?

Maybe not the best language for someone new but its widely available.

How about just a web browser?

You can run almost any language from a web browser these days:

https://repl.it/languages/

A lot of educational sites offer embedded interpreters like this.

It has never been easier to start to learn programming. The real challenge nowadays is maintaining attention...

Swift is open and available on other platforms. I can install it on a raspberry pi if I want.

https://swiftreviewer.com/2018/12/21/swift-programming-on-ra...

Once you’ve learned one programming language, it’s not hard to learn a second. It’s not terribly important what you’re first language is, and Swift isn’t a bad starting point anyway.

Huh? You can download Ubuntu builds right on their site

https://swift.org/download/

Funny. I learned on qbasic and I remember they were teaching dr racket at ubc to first year students. They were teaching java when I was in engineering and my career has basically gotten zero Mileage from that stinking heap of uncollected garbage.

One of the things that drew me to Macs as I started to learn programming in '05 was that I could simply open any macbook and type python/ruby/perl and write some code.

Different time. Now you got Homebrew

Which installs itself based on the system Ruby. Will be interesting to see how that plays out.

They just pack a statically compiled Ruby interpreter with Homebrew. Not very complex or novel. Disadvantage: install becomes more bloated (larger size).

Sure, it’s not a hard engineering challenge. However, installation instructions right now are as simple as “run this one-liner on your terminal”. That’ll have to materially change.

> Sure, it’s not a hard engineering challenge. However, installation instructions right now are as simple as “run this one-liner on your terminal”. That’ll have to materially change.

It could just as well still remain a one-liner. Every system Homebrew is installed on has Bash installed (not the latest, but still).

Instead of

> /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/in...

It could become

> curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/in... | bash

With the install script containing a payload containing the current Ruby script plus a Ruby interpreter. Still a "one liner".

> Every system Homebrew is installed on has Bash installed

Ironically, they are also moving from bash to zsh for default shell. Again not an unsurmontable challenge (just make sure the bang is correct in your scripts, bash will likely still be around somewhere in macOS for the foreseeable future) but another little hurdle to mind.

Doesn't surprise me given they dislike GPLv3 and Zsh is MIT.

Personally I try to use #!/bin/sh as much as possible, and Fish as my default shell.

upvoted for fish

As far as I'm aware they're not changing anything about which shells are installed or which executable /bin/sh points to they're just changing the default login shell for a new user, so nothing should have to change about the scripts that are (or have been) written.

Take a look at the installation instructions for the Rust compiler.

https://rustup.rs/

Like it works now with older versions of macOS and on Linux: it downloads a Ruby binary when it's not available on the host system.

But you have to download Xcode if you want a C compiler!

On the up side though, clang has made the C/C++/ObjC world a much better place.

I had the opposite experience with AppleScript - the development tool (Script Editor) was simple enough for me to understand that it was the way I taught myself to program when I was 13.

(OK, I learned Logo in school when I was 7, but programming became way more interesting when I discovered AppleScript's APIs to control all the programs on my Mac).

>As a counter-anecdote, the built in Ruby interpreter in Mac OS X Tiger was the way I learned to program and how I got interested in programming

And you think a one-click download and install of Ruby would have prevented that?

Not to mention Apple also has Swift, and Swift Playgrounds and so on for kids these days.

Sure... but that was then. I too had a real hard time learning Ruby back in the day. But now if you google any Ruby or Rails how-tos they will include a one-line Brew and RBENV install.

So I get what you are saying but I think we are in a new world here.

Swift Playground for macOS? One can hope!

Technically Xcode has supported Playgrounds since before the iOS app existed, though if you mean the teaching content, it doesn't have that.

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