Not that it is impossible, but it is surprisingly difficult and not shocking that fewer do it. (Of course, I question myself on that claim. Fewer, but by what measure? And do I have proof?)
But they have since handed the whole project over to MIT.
Frankly Android could have been a computer in our pockets, and i get the feel Rubin wanted to take it in that direction.
But around the time of 3.x-4.0 there was pressure from elsewhere in Google to take in a more iOS direction. We see this with the introduction of music and video into the then named Android Marketplace (later renamed Google Play).
And then there was the whole push towards ChromeOS as the choice of businesses, complete with Citrix being a launch day demo.
Only in the last few years have Google done an about face regading Android. Both with Android apps coming to ChromeOS, and with various functionality being added to Android to make it more business friendly.
To the point of android, though. I am getting my kids a Kano computer. Hoping that line will get them interested in the nuts and bolts, as it were. I need to be better and build things with them. :(
Not to mention c# is a beautiful language.
Dream on. MS will implement just enough for cloud devs to use Windows as their dev environment, with a clear push towards Azure as the cloud of choice.
I grew up in that era, and I'm still nostalgic about it. On the other hand, a tablet PC plus Jupyter/Python comes pretty darn close to satisfying that need.
Microsoft screwed up badly when they decided you can't put a Metro style interface on a Win32 program and get touch support that way.
You either have to make it a Metro app (and ship it via their store), massively curtailing what you can do, or stay with the Win32 WIMP. And even when you tweak the size of various Win32 elements it is still a mess to operate via touch.
Edit: and using jupyter with a tablet strikes me as accessing a mainframe from a terminal (something a micro could act as with the right software).
This isn't my only computer, and indeed doing anything with code from a touch screen is marginal at best, but at least it's possible. On a bigger computer, of course I get a bigger screen and keyboard.
Admittedly, I had to look up what Metro and WIMP are. I'm not actually trying to create apps that others can use. My use of programming is largely for my own productivity and learning.
Just the point/click nature of jupyter?
I guess it's the REPL-on-steroids nature of Jupyter that I like. Also, having inline matplotlib graphs is pretty killer.
My favorite is grabbing logs with a shell block. Reshaping with elisp or Python, and then charting with gnuplot. All in one file with an iterative workflow.
All this gets me thinking back to the micros and how they booted straight into a BASIC interpreter.
In a sense while booting to a mouse (or touch) driven GUI helps with getting now common tasks done out of the box. That no mainstream OS ship with something that allows someone to sit down and instruct a computer similarly to how it was done back then seems to have turned modern personal computers into near appliances.