I used Python, but recently discovered Pythonista for iOS. Far nicer looking interface, plus it ships touch and layer libraries for graphics stuff.

Pythonista looks nice, thanks for the tip. Some simple touch-based codes are part of the app, ready to tinker with.

Forgive the density of this question, but.. what exactly can you do with this? There is very little info both on the app's page, as well as the author's webpage.

Can you, for instance, import os (or equivalent) and interact with the phone's file system? Does the standard lib work, or some percentage of it?

Does anyone have any detailed information?

It gives you an interactive python shell on your iOS device. You can't access the file system, because of the OS's sandboxing rules. The standard library does work modulo any sandbox rules. You can, for example, write scripts that use urllib to talk over a network and do some work.

I keep seeing this on HN, and keep thinking "Finally, can write apps in python", then it goes back to the same old python shell program and I'm a bit saddened.

If you are interested in _that_ kind of thing, here you go: http://kivy.org/#home

I definitely am. That is neat.

Not quite "Python rubymotion" but still interesting.

So what's stopping you from writing apps in python?

How does work if Apple forbids managed runtimes to exist in iOS?

They don't, they only forbid downloading and executing new code after installation.

So could you download an extension python module and run it? If so, it should be disallowed from the app store (going by Apple's rules).

It seems there are ways:

http://forums.pythonforios.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=405 http://forums.pythonforios.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=453

Whether Apple haven't noticed yet, or are just turning a blind eye, I don't know.

If that was the case you could run Mono/.NET code without pre-JITting it. And that is not the case.

It IS the case. What you can't do is JITting. And, as far as I know, no one has bothered porting a pure .NET interpreter to iOS.

I think they forbid JITting, but you can still interpret whatever you want.

How do people use these sort of things? I'm genuinely curious. It's not even that fancy of a calc app, since you can't support numpy or plotting.

If someone could implement something similar to http://www.mathworks.com/mobile/ for Python, now that would be cool!

Sweet, I've got the 2.7 app and have been waiting for 3.2!