Or – gasp – Instagram or TikTok!
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I just listened to a radio show where they talked about how easy it is to create (rap music and music videos in this case) these days, as all you need is your phone rather than expensive devices and desktop applications.
What about in absolute terms? How many millions of developers would write or run code on their phone / tablet if they could?
I believe that when someone’s idea of what people want equals to the status quo, they just talk out of their Stockholm’s.
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The kind of programming people are agitating for in threads like these is emphatically NOT general-purpose programming. It's a very specific kind of proto-programming - being able to write direct inputs in exactly the kind of way you'd write software in the 1980s; a core example being the ability to write for a built-in BASIC interpreter, right on the commandline.
Plot twist: that shit's useless.
I grew up in that era, and that kind of programming is a toy. You can write gimmicky little things like outputting text in various colors, or at extraordinary expense, you can use these incredibly basic building-blocks to jerry-rig higher-level constructs to actually accomplish something meaningful.
It's an incredibly damning indictment that most of the successful pieces of software from that era started by bootstrapping their way out of having to do direct "dos/apple console" programming and wrote a high-level interpreter for something better so they didn't have to deal with that; every major title did something like its own virtual machine (c.f. lucasarts games), its own lisp interpreter, etc.
It doesn't teach you to program; it teaches you to bootstrap language interpreters — if you get incredibly lucky and figure that out on your own. The other "99% of space marines get attrited in training"; the other 99% of aspiring programmers from that era never figured that out, and gave up at the blinkenlights stage, without ever building an actual piece of software, or really getting their machine to actually do anything. I use that example to illustrate the absurdity: the WH40K trope is meant to be satire, because that level of attrition in any field is just a bafflingly wasteful way to elevate people to higher skillsets. Survivor bias may make heroes out of the tiny minority of people who actually made it (the Jordan Mechners of the world), but the cost in people who never "break through" isn't worth it.
I'd rather teach people to actually program. Teaching them to build the ingredients for programming (not the universal ingredients, but just the ingredients to enable it on one very particular kind of host medium) isn't it.
My regard to that "programming" era is: "rest in piss, you won't be missed".
The scale is just immense and is a completely different audience.
Yeah, it's a different world than on-device compilers on back in the 80's but we're not programming in the 80's any more either. Hell, Stack Overflow didn't come about until 2008. Try telling people you learned to program before Stack Overflow (and Google, for that matter).
There are still millions of people who want to do this.
The question is more: why do phone companies actively discourage it?
It’s not full out programming but it is a good entry way once you are done with scratch.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22IDE%22+apps+on+iOS+app+store&no...
The other thing I'd add is that even when I want to write a mobile app, doing it on the device itself would be a nightmare. Composing emails is already hard enough.
Yeah there’s flutter or react for app development. But it’s just different.
Samsung has a thing called “dex” that allows your smartphone to hook up to an external monitor, as does the steam deck. These machines are powerful enough to develop on, they’re just locked down enough
Software working out of the box and programming aren’t mutually exclusive.
I say the latter. I used to program with great facility in BASIC on my calculator in high school. I was not even the only one who could do this. The input methods available were much less rich than what a smartphone can provide, not to mention the display. Now, in 2023, the easiest way to write simple programs on my phone is by emulating that calculator. Come on!
To the original question, table stakes are an order of magnitude greater than when 80's computers booted to a Basic prompt.
In regards to plugins, someone has to write them. Even if the people writing those plugins use LLM tools to assist them they still need to know how to put software together and how to manage all of the services that those APIs talk to and how to scale their infrastructure along with user growth.
Here's just a random example, a full python environment for iPhone/iPad:
I think this is the key problem, no more no less. If I had a decent keyboard I would be much more inclined to write software on my phone. Come on, there isn’t even a shift key, led along the other modifiers.
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 accessing non-alphanumeric symbols sometimes requires clicking the "modifier" thing once or twice.
The on-screen touch-driven keyboard also takes up at least half of the screen, and shrinking it makes hitting a specific key much more difficult.
There is also the difficulty in holding the phone while doing all of this!
On Android you can connect a regular keyboard to the device and use that, then I think working on stuff could be viable!
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.
in another way, it is possible to connect a keyboard to cellphone.
> I think your obvious answer is wrong
You are saying this is wrong:
> The answer is obvious - most people don’t want to do this.
You are saying you believe the majority of people *do* want to learn to program?
I’m my eyes the BASIC prompts at startup we’re there because that’s how you had to interact with computers at the time. Seems like the vast majority of people want to use their phones not program them.
Short answer is yes. Don't you see how much video environment sucks to text environment? You can not do science in ProCreate or iMovie.
What can I do to stop the conception of "real work" to be nebulous?
Mobile text editors play ads before opening a new tab or loading a file.
They're devices for consoomer cattle. (To paraphrase Terry Davis.)
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 in ProCreate or iMovie. It would help if programmers like us eased up on everyone else. Not everyone needs to be exactly like us.
Also, you have to be living under a literal rock if you’ve missed the potential impact of LLMs, specifically chatGPT plugins. Once that’s generally available, everyone can tell the LLM what they want in English and have it done. Everyone can build custom recipes to reuse or create them on the fly. That’s a revolution waiting to happen. And it’ll happen without having to show every smartphone user a basic terminal.