As a counterpoint, it’s labeled as “This is not an officially supported Google product.” Maybe this isn’t enough to stave off brand association?

Would you rather they never allow engineers to release it at all? When I worked at Apple, that was the fate of any internal effort or pet project that did not receive full executive buy in, and as an engineer I badly prefer the ability to open source projects in whatever state they were left, to be useful to anyone who wants to pick the bones or start something similar.

Disclaimer: I work for Google, but my opinions are my own.

It really bothers me that people so closely associate these "Not Google" projects with Google. I've seen repositories with not even a README, any documentation, or so much as an explanation of _what the project even is_ end up on the front page of /r/programming just because "Wow it's a Google project!! so interesting I wonder what it does???"

Google is a _huge_ company, not everybody that creates something there is showing some internal direction of the company..

But it doesn't say "Not Google", it says "This is not an officially supported Google product." I read that as saying "Google totally made this, but please don't call tech support if it breaks."

Or maybe it just means that someone spent 10% of their time at Google trying to make something cool and it's not a serious project.

It’s not really the same as a learning tool, but Google has FlutterPad [0] which is an online playground for Flutter app development.

Which if you’ve never played with, it’s extremely easy to see how Flutter and Dart work. Most online tutorials can be completed right in FlutterPad. So Google does know people want this, just seem to care more about other things right now.

[0] http://flutterpad.com/

they are conceptually different things.

i started exploring swift a few weeks ago and these playgrounds are quite handy. for python programmers: it's like a jupyter notebook but with outputs on the right & auto evaluation.

it's a generic instant feedback tool for swift but deeply integrated with xcode. i think, what apple did here is simply decoupling it from xcode. this is huge because swift is quite powerful and a complex language already. i am curious what direction they take this.