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A comment on Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like ... by amelius on Saturday April 15, 2023 @12:35PM (#35582160)
> The answer is obvious - most people don’t want to do this.

There are still millions of people who want to do this.

The question is more: why do phone companies actively discourage it?

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Re:Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like ... by paulryanrogers on Saturday April 15, 2023 @12:52PM (#35582309)
Because they're selling to the least common denominator, not to a niche of power users. With time the power will be more evenly distributed. But that will probably require new methods and tooling that haven't even been invented yet.
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Re:Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like ... by great_psy on Saturday April 15, 2023 @01:00PM (#35582386)
Have you played around with the shortcuts app on the iPhone ? It is pretty powerful for something that is highly constrained to a few select operations.

It’s not full out programming but it is a good entry way once you are done with scratch.

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Re:Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like ... by tdeck on Saturday April 15, 2023 @02:24PM (#35583191)
By "phone companies" you really mean Apple. You can do this easily in Android, there are even full-blown IDEs for various languages in the Play store. Google created App Inventor as an entry-level way of doing this. None of this seems to be particularly popular but it's an option.
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Re:Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like ... by kfir on Saturday April 15, 2023 @03:55PM (#35583993)
Are you familiar with swift playground? https://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/
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Re:Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like ... by tdeck on Saturday April 15, 2023 @07:10PM (#35585566)
I wasn't but this looks fun!
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Re:Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like ... by DerekL on Sunday April 16, 2023 @03:16AM (#35587962)
They're on iOS too.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22IDE%22+apps+on+iOS+app+store&no...

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Re:Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like ... by cellularmitosis on Saturday April 15, 2023 @10:59PM (#35586863)
What do you mean by actively discourage? There are many interpreter and REPL apps, there are swift playgrounds, etc, and there is nothing stopping you from submitting yet another programming app to the AppStore.
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