Starting in Swift Playgrounds 2, you can now use localized strings to guide the narration of your interactive lessons. As the screenshot above demonstrates, you can used localizable markup to provide the most appropriate text for titles, introductory text, and feedback.

However, what you can’t do is localize Swift members. Your French and Chinese consumers must tell Byte to moveForward(), not avancer() or 向前移动().

One of the guiding principles of the Swift language is demonstrated in its embrace of unicode for identifier symbols. This approach accommodates programmers and programming styles from many languages and cultures.

Xcode 9 has introduced major advances in code refactoring. It seems an obvious win to allow that technology to be applied to Swift Playgrounds 2, enabling identifier localization.

That’s because identifiers play such a key role in Swift Playgrounds. Unlike standard development tasks, where it’s unnecessary to create idiomatic APIs like IUContrôleurDeNavigation, the point of Swift Playgrounds is to teach and instruct. It uses small, limited, controlled API exposure, nearly all custom and supporting of the teaching story.

The anthropomorphized Byte character acts as a stand-in for the learner coder. And in doing so, it should communicate with commands that this coder identifies with, turnLeft and moveForward, not incomprehensibleForeignPhrase1 and evenMoreConfusingForeignPhrase2.

I think this is an opportunity waiting to happen, and I can’t imagine it would be all that hard to implement given the expansive identifier suite and the limited API visibility presented in a typical playgroundBook.

What do you think? Is it too much to ask for a localizable.Members.plist?