I occasionally program on my smartphone, and the big problems are the manual interface and the lack of total control of my file systeme.
Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?
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Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?
#92Speaking for myself, the command line prompt never inspired me to learn programming. I messed with quite a few Commadore and even Sinclair computers back in the day and the command line was only ever used to load programs from disk.
I did try programming from scratch and even typed in some of the programs published in BYTE and whatnot. Nothing I ever came up with on my own ever seemed worth the effort and certainly wasn’t how I wanted to use my time. What a pain in the ass. Typing all that crap and debugging was never as interesting as using programs.
The vast majority of people have no interest in messing with programming. Most people have no internet in making anything. You can complain that it’s a symptom of consumer culture or whatever but I think it has always been the case that more people want to use a tool than make a tool. Even back in the 80s computers were bought to use programs primarily. Only a tiny minority were interested in programming and that will always be the case.
Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?
#93I'd argue that a mobile phone is not an adequate platform for coding. The touchscreen and keyboard layouts make it difficult to type needed symbols, distracting from the problem at hand. Coding requires deep thought, but phones are optimized for moving around rather than sitting in one place and thinking. As such, use cases like maps, calendars, communication and alarms get priority. The reason people buy a phone is…
I would like to challenge you a little. Most programming languages are all designed around an environment where typing is relatively easy and quick. Keyboards allow you to input so much quicker than phone screens.
However, the phone has the pro that you can have any arbitrary keyboard layout. In that case I think that perhaps APL might be pretty well suited. Perhaps we should design languages around the idea that they should be used on phonescreens, where we don't need to restrict the character set to ASCI?
I have an APL program and I like using it basically like a calculator, but I imagine one could write full programs on a phone, if we did some tweaking to the interface.
Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?
#94Raspberry pi
Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?
#95Because smartphones are designed to keep you stupid. Computer literacy means you are able to poke holes in their shitty abstractions. The industry does not want you programming or creating, the industry wants you to be consuming. Preferably with your credit card.
Before people dismiss this as a conspiracy theory, it's 100% correct. It's not even a radical view.
* Authoritarian governments don't give their subjects a good civic education because an educated population tends to start demanding more freedoms.
* Industrial barons never wanted their factory workers to learn about unions because once they did, sure enough they wanted to unionize.
* To desire and defend your digital rights you need to understand how the digital world works, and what's at stake. Big tech doesn't want you thinking about uncomfortable things like that. They want you to pay your monthly fees, watch the ads they put in front of you, go to bed and do it all again tomorrow.
Virtually everyone with power, since the beginning of civilization, has preferred for their subjects to be poorly informed about anything that threatens their power.
Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?
#96The answer is obvious - most people don’t want to do this. They want to text or call a friend, look up the weather or sports, stream some entertainment or read the news. They’re experts in their own domains and don’t have the time or inclination to learn programming. There’s some heavy condescension in this thread, claiming that not programming “keeps people stupid”. As if creating can only happen in an IDE and not i…
> and not in ProCreate or iMovie.
Or – gasp – Instagram or TikTok!
—
I just listened to a radio show where they talked about how easy it is to create (rap music and music videos in this case) these days, as all you need is your phone rather than expensive devices and desktop applications.
Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?
#97Because it's not in their best interest. Smartphone makers are big tech, big tech only wants you to learn their framework to be locked into using big tech for life. No one wants you to learn to think on your own. Learn Dashly(tm) for Pear Phone or don't program at all. The reality is the time for tinkering and stuff is over (for pc workloads, you can tinker all you like with hardware/agri/space/radio/nuclear open-sou…
there's still tech out there that does, like the pinephone. It's going to be niche, but it exists
not saying they don't exist, but to penetrate that 1% market share to be relevant they have not. I did call out things like raspi and such as still viable for tinkering but not the same way that I was introduced to computers with the Apple II and later the 386/486DX revolution. Around Pentium II things got anti-tinker and ever since 2007 it's been pretty much a consumer-only market. Walled gardens and locked down OS's, complete with injected ads and tracking.
Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?
#98Because smartphones are designed to keep you stupid. Computer literacy means you are able to poke holes in their shitty abstractions. The industry does not want you programming or creating, the industry wants you to be consuming. Preferably with your credit card.
> The industry does not want you [...] creating
Twitter, Instagram and TikTok would like to differ. User created content is still a major thing, even if we stopped calling it web 2.0. Most of that just happens in other domains than programming (though Roblox exists, so programming does happen too).
Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?
#99The answer is obvious - most people don’t want to do this. They want to text or call a friend, look up the weather or sports, stream some entertainment or read the news. They’re experts in their own domains and don’t have the time or inclination to learn programming. There’s some heavy condescension in this thread, claiming that not programming “keeps people stupid”. As if creating can only happen in an IDE and not i…
Yeah and to add to this: People, in general, want to connect with other people. Programming is a means to that end. Only for a small part of the population is programming in itself an end.
Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?
#100Computers from the era were pretty much completely contained units. Smartphones require some other service to do anything useful, and those companies don't want to support devices that have been tinkered with.