Okay, my mistake, I apologize. One of the problems with living in a fast-moving world is that sometimes I lose track of what is obvious and what is not. I just

Okay, my mistake, I apologize. One of the problems with living in a fast-moving world is that sometimes I lose track of what is obvious and what is not. I just saw a demo of Eclipse Orion: http://jaxenter.com/eclipse-orion-the-new-ide-paradigm-33431.html http://jaxenter.com/eclipse-orion-the-new-ide-paradigm-33431... ... so at the moment it is blindingly obvious to me -- apparently so obvious that I forget to mention it to other people -- that you could easily build an HTML5 app that allows students to edit and run Javascript from Safari on the iPad. Having grasped that, I have already started assuming that such apps exist and acting accordingly. But I'm ahead of myself, so I'll concede: It might be impossible to usefully write executable Javascript on an iPad today. We might have to wait a few more weeks. If iPad-friendly HTML5-powered Javascript editors don't already exist, I don't know why not. Perhaps there is too little demand. Perhaps we were all waiting for something like Orion to provide the proof of concept. Perhaps nobody has gotten around to it yet. Perhaps the founders of the appropriate startups are still building it and haven't launched yet. Or perhaps nobody wants to edit code on an iPad when PCs are a dime a dozen. I can hardly blame them for that. I like real keyboards for hacking, just as I like oscilloscopes for designing audio electronics. But it's not Apple's fault, exactly, that the iPad isn't particularly well designed for typing code. They make other machines for typing code. The iPad is designed for iPad things, just as my car is designed for daily driving and not for stock-car racing.