Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?

We need something that utilizes touch screens to implement logic.

Something like Scratch but that would let you import libraries. Although I don’t think that’s imaginative enough to surpass traditional keyboard programming.

The problem with visual languages thus far is that they don’t really accomplish anything beyond text languages. I find them to be more difficult to understand than say python or JS.

The future of business logic app programming is going to be describing the details and having some AI implement it.

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The kind of programming people are agitating for in threads like these is emphatically NOT general-purpose programming. It's a very specific kind of proto-programming - being able to write direct inputs in exactly the kind of way you'd write software in the 1980s; a core example being the ability to write for a built-in BASIC interpreter, right on the commandline.

Plot twist: that shit's useless.

I grew up in that era, and that kind of programming is a toy. You can write gimmicky little things like outputting text in various colors, or at extraordinary expense, you can use these incredibly basic building-blocks to jerry-rig higher-level constructs to actually accomplish something meaningful.

It's an incredibly damning indictment that most of the successful pieces of software from that era started by bootstrapping their way out of having to do direct "dos/apple console" programming and wrote a high-level interpreter for something better so they didn't have to deal with that; every major title did something like its own virtual machine (c.f. lucasarts games), its own lisp interpreter, etc.

It doesn't teach you to program; it teaches you to bootstrap language interpreters — if you get incredibly lucky and figure that out on your own. The other "99% of space marines get attrited in training"; the other 99% of aspiring programmers from that era never figured that out, and gave up at the blinkenlights stage, without ever building an actual piece of software, or really getting their machine to actually do anything. I use that example to illustrate the absurdity: the WH40K trope is meant to be satire, because that level of attrition in any field is just a bafflingly wasteful way to elevate people to higher skillsets. Survivor bias may make heroes out of the tiny minority of people who actually made it (the Jordan Mechners of the world), but the cost in people who never "break through" isn't worth it.

I'd rather teach people to actually program. Teaching them to build the ingredients for programming (not the universal ingredients, but just the ingredients to enable it on one very particular kind of host medium) isn't it.

My regard to that "programming" era is: "rest in piss, you won't be missed".

To the original question, table stakes are an order of magnitude greater than when 80's computers booted to a Basic prompt.