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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?

#201

Post by zamnos »

wiseowise wrote: post #163
dTal wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For this to be true, logically the tools to create smartphone programs would be fiercely protected and only available to the chosen few In a way, they are. They are gatekept in a way that is transparent to you because you find yourself on the correct side of the gate. Apple's gatekeeping is overt, while Google's is more covert: 1) They require a desktop computer - a powerful one at that. Apple requires a Mac. It wou…

Hello world is literally one line nowadays. Your resource is ridiculously outdated. > setContent { Text("Hello world!") } https://developer.android.com/jetpack/compose/tutorial

Even easier: https://jsfiddle.net/z67w94jr/

I was able to type that out on my phone with only a little bit of trouble.

Reworking jsfiddle's UX to be optimized for smartphones (aka remove the huge left div) is an easy win. I'd be surprised if there wasn't already something like that in the edtech space, where teaching kids to code is currently very popular.

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

#202

Post by 8bitsrule »

They certainly could. The CPUs are fast enough, they've plenty of memory. They could have a programming mode you could flip into and displace all the other kludges.

They could have a USB port that takes a keyboard, because typing with your thumbs is simian. They could have a video-output port, because the screen is too damn small. They could have an easy-to-use filesystem ... but they don't.

So they're unsuited to purpose, on purpose I'm sure. They're not trying to get to thinkers. If I wanted to program away from a desktop, it'd be something on Linux, something tablet-sized, a USB port for a roll-up keyboard, an analog audio-jack. Maybe with a RasPi. No phone, radio, bluetooth, GPS or spyware, no fat cluster of worthless junkware. I can wait. Until then, a laptop. And if the code can't run on a phone, oh well. They had their chance.

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

#203

Post by Kokouane »

chlorion wrote: post #196
comfypotato wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the comments until I found this one. There’s something to be said for not needing the blazing speed of vim/Emacs, because most of the work is thinking, but smartphones are so far on the opposite end of the spectrum that the input and interaction with the dev environment is prohibitive. I think this is the key problem, no more no less. If I had a decent keyboard I would be much more inclined to write software o…

I'm not sure what you mean about blazing speed and Emacs. Emacs is not a modal editor and isn't intended to increase your typing or code editing speed anymore than any other text editor. I think people assume that Emacs is a modal editor like Vim but I'm not totally sure why that is. Otherwise I agree that the mobile input methods are simply too limiting to work with. Moving around the cursor is pretty difficult and…

> Emacs is not a modal editor and isn't intended to increase your typing or code editing speed anymore than any other text editor.

This is true by default, but many people do use Spacemacs or Emacs with doom mode enabled which does allow vi keybindings, so I think some people associate it with modal editing.

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

#204

Post by [deleted] »

nindalf wrote: post #85

The 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…

[deleted]

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

#205

Post by cellularmitosis »

amelius wrote: post #113
nindalf wrote: post #85

The 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…

> The answer is obvious - most people don’t want to do this. There are still millions of people who want to do this. The question is more: why do phone companies actively discourage it?

What do you mean by actively discourage? There are many interpreter and REPL apps, there are swift playgrounds, etc, and there is nothing stopping you from submitting yet another programming app to the AppStore.

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

#206

Post by eternityforest »

Because that's a terrible way to interact with computers for 99% of applications.

Now the market is so big, we have enough customers to justify a polished, easy to use, featureful app for every task.

And people want security, meaning we need lots and lots of boilerplate to deal with all the permissioned APIs, plus we want reliability, so we can't just let people peek and poke. If we let people do that the app store would fill up with apps that used it, and half of them would be unreliable, and stuff would suck.

In fact, if there was a prompt at all, hackers could trick people into typing evil commands like they do to Linux newbies. Then those of us with tech experience would have to deal with it.

Much better to offer equivalent capability in a way that doesn't have an easy to exploit hole on the human side.

Smartphones DO encourage programming. There's like a million apps. They don't need a basic prompt, they just need to be there and really capable and make people feel its worth learning to develop for them.

There are various sandboxed easy to use dev apps on Android for those who want to do old school 80s BASIC stuff. And it's a pretty cool thing, but it's best kept where it belongs, in an app, not conflicting with the primary use case of the phone.

I do wish Google would support Flutter a little better and make stuff easier so we didn't need buggy third party libs though.

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

#208

Post by perryizgr8 »

acomjean wrote: post #148
dehrmann wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in tech as a software engineer and I (mostly) don't want to do this. I want my phone to work out of the box. The other thing I'd add is that even when I want to write a mobile app, doing it on the device itself would be a nightmare. Composing emails is already hard enough.

If I wanted to write a mobile app for an apple device I really can’t do a native one as I run Linux on my computers. Yeah there’s flutter or react for app development. But it’s just different. Samsung has a thing called “dex” that allows your smartphone to hook up to an external monitor, as does the steam deck. These machines are powerful enough to develop on, they’re just locked down enough

You can run full blown VS code on Dex. It is quite slow on my S10, but this is a 4 year old phone now.

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

#209

Post by eimrine »

KyeRussell wrote: post #190
eimrine wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As if creating can only happen in an IDE and not in ProCreate or iMovie. Short answer is yes. Don't you see how much video environment sucks to text environment? You can not do science in ProCreate or iMovie.

Nobody that “does science” says “do science”. This just feels like you’re advocating for some nebulous form of “real work”. Check your priors.

The fact that smartphones encourage video creating and not encourage programming is the essence of the topic. Also smartphones discourage to have a "real talk" because of touchscreen is better to spam animated smiles instead of text. Also smartphones discourage to use a "real software" because they are shaped to be an environment for spyware. Also smartphones discourage to use a "real web-browser" because apps are just "more native" webpages without tabs, scale, ability to change fonts and all the nativeness is about to steal as much data as possible.

What can I do to stop the conception of "real work" to be nebulous?

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

#210

Post by martyalain »

mg wrote: post #29

The C64&Co did not have a browser. Nowadays you can go to a page like this ... https://no-gravity.github.io/html_editor/ ... edit the code and see the result in real time.

Thanks to browsers and wikis you can read code, edit it and see result in real time: http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/ , http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/?view=janus
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