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In 2006-2007, just before iPhone was released, we tried to pitch Nokia to adopt Python as the main language for mobile application development. We even wrote a

by vtuulos 10y ago

In 2006-2007, just before iPhone was released, we tried to pitch Nokia to adopt Python as the main language for mobile application development. We even wrote a book about it: https://www.amazon.com/Mobile-Python-prototyping-applications-platform/dp/0470515058 https://www.amazon.com/Mobile-Python-prototyping-application... Python for Symbian (S60) was amazing - arguably the best way to develop smartphone apps at the time. It made you orders of magnitude more productive than native, convoluted version of C++. It came with bindings to camera, accelerometer etc. The underlying vision was to enable large masses of people to develop mobile apps quickly and thus unlock Nokia's capable hardware that was buried under a clunky OS. A Python-based user-driven app ecosystem might not have killed iPhone but it might have filled some of the vacuum that gave rise to Android. Nokia was way ahead of its time with many ideas.

skykooler 10y ago
Interestingly, the Jolla phone - arguably the descendant of Nokia's smartphone programs - uses Python as one of the native app languages. So it finally made it, albeit outside of Nokia's ecosystem.
asmosoinio 10y ago
You were working on that? I was using that for a prototype app and REALLY liked the productivity after a few years of S60 "C++" programming. So: Thanks! But I think it was kinda hard to get installation instructions clear enough for our partners to install the Python app. Not that I really remember anymore what the installation steps were...
limmeau 10y ago
I got that book. It helped me deduplicate the address book of my E72 from within an interactive Python session. Oh, those times.
pjmlp 10y ago
I was an employee on those days and Symbian C++ really required an extra dose of love, even PIPS didn't make it much better. Symbian architecture was quite interesting but the tooling was horrendous, first the Codewarrior IDE, then the two iterations of Eclipse based tooling, all having a pile of Perl and Bash scripts underneath. This one reason why external developers went to more pleasant pastures, where programming didn't meant a daily fight with the tools.

by vtuulos 10y ago

skykooler 10y ago

Interestingly, the Jolla phone - arguably the descendant of Nokia's smartphone programs - uses Python as one of the native app languages. So it finally made it, albeit outside of Nokia's ecosystem.

asmosoinio 10y ago

You were working on that? I was using that for a prototype app and REALLY liked the productivity after a few years of S60 "C++" programming. So: Thanks! But I think it was kinda hard to get installation instructions clear enough for our partners to install the Python app. Not that I really remember anymore what the installation steps were...

limmeau 10y ago

I got that book. It helped me deduplicate the address book of my E72 from within an interactive Python session. Oh, those times.

pjmlp 10y ago

I was an employee on those days and Symbian C++ really required an extra dose of love, even PIPS didn't make it much better. Symbian architecture was quite interesting but the tooling was horrendous, first the Codewarrior IDE, then the two iterations of Eclipse based tooling, all having a pile of Perl and Bash scripts underneath. This one reason why external developers went to more pleasant pastures, where programming didn't meant a daily fight with the tools.