All the fora you mention are characterized by lack of longform text. What people are creating today tends to be image-heavy and eschew any long argumentation or prose storytelling.
Having just a smartphone obviously represents a limitation. For example, I am a member of some niche travel communities. A decade ago, when it was common for people to lug a laptop, there was a healthier community of people writing detailed blog posts on certain destinations, editing Wikivoyage or Hitchwiki, etc. Now that those same travelers are leaving the laptop at home and traveling only with a phone where it is inconvenient to enter much text, the ecosystem of travel resources is actually poorer than it was in the past.
Swift playgrounds will actually run quite large codebases with a little fiddling around.
You can trivially get a robust Linux command line with Blink and a free tier Google compute instance.
I agree there is no XCode.
This is in contrast to almost anything else you might care to do on a computer, where the iPad equivalent ranges from "basically fine" to "actually better".
But people's perceptions are lagging a few years behind where the platform is at. That's normal.
I didn’t make the distinction between writing code and writing software but I guess it’s an important one.
I think you’d be surprised how close swift playgrounds has become.
All it really needs is a project navigation UI, and it will be good enough for building pure Swift/SwiftUI apps.
I don’t think this is true at all, everybody that has a Twitter / Facebook / Instagram / YouTube / TikTok account is a content creator. There’s a reason the term “browsing the web” has died out, it’s not about passive consumption anymore.
Writing code is just about the only thing you can’t do on an iPad. And while I think we can all agree on HN that having a gateway to programming is super important, you can’t expect most people to care.
Typed on my iPhone. In bed.