> Once below-1000€-laptops/desktops disappear in favour of oversized tablets, how are children going to learn coding? Simple enough; they'll code on tablets.

> Once below-1000€-laptops/desktops disappear in favour of oversized tablets, how are children going to learn coding? Simple enough; they'll code on tablets. I'm actually currently working on a prototype for how a simple, useful development environment might look on a phone or tablet. It's a stack-based concatenative array language with a zoomable user interface. Instead of representing code as lines of text, it takes a more Smalltalk-like approach of a live environment. The benefit of being a concatenative language is that it naturally lends itself to a tree-like format where each word can be viewed and edited on a phone screen. Since semantically it's closer to a weird mashup of J and Perl(!), it can be concise (hopefully still readable) and the vector aspect makes drawing graphics pretty straightforward. The downside, of course, is that it can be quite hard to reason in. Truthfully, I'm not really sure how to work around that—and I don't think most children will easily think in a function composition/matrix manipulation way. That said, I'd like to find something since I'm fairly sold on the idea that tacit programming with arrays is key to making coding on a tablet work (I think it's fairly clear that imperative or even conventional function languages would be a royal pain to use in such an environment). Maybe something Lisp-like where the user zooms around the AST would be an alternative. > Poor people in developed countries? Much cheaper phones and tablets are already vastly more popular than laptops or desktops among poor people. The solution is to move coding forward on mobile, not simply keep rather trashy cheap laptops around.