Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve looked at the first two of those and I found them still too awkward due to being very text-typing heavy. Similar to play.js so I guess it mightn’t work well for me. I do have a keyboard and get by, but it’s uncomfortable for anything but shortish bursts and while I can of course use a normal keyboard, when I have one available I typically also have a laptop or desktop available so it’s easier to just use those.…
Graphical development environments like that are a nice idea, but tend to be somewhat limited and very domain specific. Pythonista does come with a graphical UI builder, but it is still a very code intensive environment.
Sure, they tend to be, but in my experience with them (mainly Max/MSP and Synthmaker) they don't have to be. The potential is there, but nobody has really done it well. Max/MSP came close when I last used it, but had a few annoying limitations[1] and there's a general negative sentiment towards graphical programming environments, which I feel puts a lot of people off trying them in earnest and therefore puts people off experimenting with building them (and they will never improve if people don't try -- remember, we have decades of textual language evolution and tooling).
Some of the negativity is justified, but some of it is, in my opinion, not. For example, people criticise the visual spaghetti code and cite examples from many existing visual languages (usually the domain specific ones), but ignore that these domain specific ones are used by non-programmers who never learned software engineering principles. Textual code when written by these same people is just as much spaghetti code lacking encapsulation and abstraction and good naming conventions as visual code written by these people. I've seen some Max/MSP code that was downright beautiful and super easy to follow. Don't get me wrong, on a laptop/desktop, I totally prefer textual like everyone else, but I feel on a tablet, visual would be a great fit.
But even with the negative aspects, I think the benefits of being able to use a touchscreen outweighs the negatives, when compared to using a textual language on a touchscreen. For me, at least, if not for others.
> Pythonista does come with a graphical UI builder, but it is still a very code intensive environment.
I guess I'll give it a try, but "code intensive" sounds like what I don't want. We will see. Thanks for the recommendation regardless!
[1] At the time, I couldn't figure out a way of nesting data structures, for example. It seems this is now possible, so I don't know if it was added since or if I overlooked it at the time. There were a bunch such limitations that prevented it from being useful as a general purpose language, but since its not meant to be one, I guess it doesn't matter.