This is interesting, with online editors it's definitely possible today. The real question comes down to how to engineer the UX to actually make it comfortable to use. I hate typing a lot on mobile (maybe copilot can mitigate this) but still can't imagine a UX that would feel right. More likely I think is we get to the point (arguably possible today with apples m chips) where we can use an iPad instead of a laptop but that gain is kind of meh. Fixing bugs while on my phone while riding the subway sounds pretty cool.

We currently lack the imagination to come up with a system of programming that doesn't involve lots of text. Handling lots of text is a terrible user experience on a small touchscreen.

I don't think it's impossible to come up with a good UX for programming on a phone. I've enjoyed using Shortcuts for small things.

But I also don't think anyone has put any serious effort into figuring out this problem, so I'm not holding my breath on this.

Librem 5 phone runs desktop GNU/Linux. All you need is to connect a keyboard and screen - and a full programming environment is there.

One thing I have learned is that if you have anything installed under termux, it gets completely wiped when you do an upgrade.

I lost my VAX/VMS 11-780 machine in SimH because of this, when trying to get free Pascal installed.

I hate Android and its broken security model. Some day I'll get a capabilities based system, and never have to worry about this type of stuff again.

Not exactly on a smartphone fully, but I use Samsung Galaxy S24 and absolutely love Samsung Dex. I use a Nexdock (although I will probably switch to a standalone display with a better bluetooth keyboard/touchpad combo in the future)

Termux, with code-server works very well. There are a few things that are missing. Haven't been able to get pytorch to work, but thats just a matter of figuring out how to build it from scratch.