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A comment on The web as a GUI toolkit. Parent comment

Re:The web as a GUI toolkit by divbzero on Friday February 14, 2020 @01:39AM (#22324452)
> With the web almost everyone has a machine that has a programmable environment by default again. I feel this is a very important and powerful advantage that’s often overlooked.

For this same reason, I’m disappointed that mobile browsers such as iOS Safari have yet to enable DevTools, e.g. a page inspector, network inspector, and JavaScript console. Especially for younger generations, there are many whose first computer will be a mobile device.

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Re:The web as a GUI toolkit by pjmlp on Friday February 14, 2020 @02:23AM (#22324645)
They are enabled, kind of, you need to plug the device into its bigger brother.

However, iOS more so than Android, has plenty of mature interactive code environments.

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Re:The web as a GUI toolkit by divbzero on Friday February 14, 2020 @04:12AM (#22325098)
> you need to plug the device into its bigger brother

This exactly is the challenge. If your first computer is a mobile device, you would not have that “bigger brother” available.

iOS does have Swift Playgrounds [1] and Android has the excellent Termux [2] but access to the built-in JavaScript engine would open a whole new set of possibilities.

[1]: https://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/

[2]: https://termux.com/

I was introduced to programming on a dinky little graphing calculator. My hope is that other “first computers” could offer similar opportunities for tinkering.

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Re:The web as a GUI toolkit by pjmlp on Friday February 14, 2020 @05:54AM (#22325556)
Agreed, but as mentioned there are also on device coding environments.

On iOS you also have Pythonista, Continuous, Shaderific, Codea, all much better than learning FX-4500p, FX-850P Basic.

Sadly on Android, most of the alternatives are quite lacking versus the iOS variants in capabilities and quality.

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