Yankee Stadium is to Ballparks As Xcode Is to IDEs

Before we jump into enumerations' cousins, structures and classes, let's discuss the ballpark where all the Swift games are played: Xcode.

To this point, all the code that I've written for this blog I wrote in an Xcode playground. A playground, as the playground likes to tell people when they first open it, looks like this:



In other words, a playground is a place where you can play with or practice writing some code to make sure if it works before writing it into your final project.

Why can't we just play around with stuff in our final project? Oh, you can and you will. But sometimes you'd rather practice that Jeter jump-throw on the playground behind an abandoned building than during Game 1 of the ALCS on national television.

So what is Xcode? Xcode is Yankee Stadium, Wrigley Field, Fenway Park. It's where you code the apps that will one day exist in the App Store. Unlike playgrounds which exist as is, Xcode has the ability to include files from your hard drive, to reach out to the web, and more. Playgrounds are games of pepper: Xcode is a full nine and extras if necessary.

If Wrigley is a ballpark, Xcode is an IDE. What is an IDE?  It is an Integrated Development Environment which is a fancy way of saying it's where you code software. Here's Wikipedia's definition:

And to give you a visual, here is Sublime Text 3, a popular text editor, where a developer would normally write code:

What you see here is code written in Python. And here is Swift code written in Xcode:

What similarities and differences do you see? Let's start with similarities. Both have examples of code written in them. In Sublime Text, all you see is code. In Xcode, you see code in the second panel from the right. 

And the differences? The biggest difference is what the other three panels in Xcode can do for you that regular text editors do not. 

On the far left panel there is a list of all the different files created for this project, these include assets such as images, videos, and sound files, it includes the storyboard which is what you see in the panel second from the left which acts as a visual of what you are building. It includes the actual files where you write code like what you see in the panel second from the right. And that just covers the highlighted blue folder in the upper lefthand corner of Xcode. To the right of that highlighted blue folder are seven more icons adding even more functionality from what errors or warnings there are and what they have to say, to a search function to find whatever it is you may be looking for, to the break point navigator that details where you have installed specific areas where the code should stop running so you can identify bugs. 

In short, text editors are like pitchers that strike out or walk everyone and IDEs like Xcode are pitchers that make use of their fielders to save their arms. Or what Crash Davis told Nuke here:

So relax. This game is fun goddammit. It's fun.

Going forward we are going to dig deeper into Xcode before returning to structures and classes.