Prior to smart phones, programming on phones was much more inaccessible due to hardware fragmentation. Mobile Apps are popular and APIs are available everywhere. Some deployed apps include implementations of BASIC, Python and other languages which you can use to develop right on the phone. The problem is, typing on a smart phone is terrible, and it's worse for programming. You need a keyboard and by then you might as well use a laptop.
Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?
211–220 of 235 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?
#212Companies want you to consume and not to create to become a competitor.
Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?
#213The 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…
It is more than obvious if you look at the broad picture: computers on the 80s were sold to a few million people, most of them with, at least, high school degree and math inclinations (a.k.a. "nerds"). Smartphones, o.t.o.h. are sold to billions of people. The scale is just immense and is a completely different audience.
But even then, most of the time computers were used to run programs written by others, such as spreadsheets, word processors, and games. (Though a spreadsheet can be thought of as a specialized type of program.)
Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
By "phone companies" you really mean Apple. You can do this easily in Android, there are even full-blown IDEs for various languages in the Play store. Google created App Inventor as an entry-level way of doing this. None of this seems to be particularly popular but it's an option.
They're on iOS too.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22IDE%22+apps+on+iOS+app+store&no...
Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
https://jsbin.com and https://glitch.com work ok on phones
Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?
#216When Smartphones came out I couldn't think of anything else than creating apps for it.
Naturally I learned Java and android as soon as I could. I published my first app soon after.
Well it didn't work so well on all devices. It worked on all my test Devices so I was stuck and the app was removed from the store.
Years later I released a game. It was taken offline several times before I didn't care anymore. Half of the time I didn't know why, I just submitted a new build on the current SDK it got approved and a few weeks later taken offline.
The whole ecosystem sucks. You build really temporary apps that likely won't work on future phones without rebuilding several times for new SDKs. Java is not a language that encourages fun in coding and Android makes the Java experience just worse.
Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Emacs can be anything you want if you build it or what you want is built.
Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Authoritarian governments don't give their subjects a good civic education This seems to have been untrue in the USSR, and it seems currently untrue in China, the first two big authoritarian governments that came to my mind. Also "because" is doing the heavy lifting in your sentence, I do wonder how you arrived at that causality.
In those two counties, sometimes the term "authoritarian" just means the rich aren't free to endlessly exploit the poor. In US politics, property rights are far more important than human rights, so while it might still be accurate to call all three countries authoritarian, the rhetoric just gets confusing/ambiguous and is mostly just propaganda anyways. We love overstating how much democracy we have and understating how much democracy our competitors have.
Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?
#219Because 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).
Those platforms are dominated by cookie cutter content.
Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?
#220The 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 devices also inherently bar you from doing this even if you wanted.
Mobile text editors play ads before opening a new tab or loading a file.
They're devices for consoomer cattle. (To paraphrase Terry Davis.)