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You can program iOS devices to do something new, but there are a few limitations on how that is made available. You can develop full blown iPhone and iPad apps

by simonh 4y ago

You can program iOS devices to do something new, but there are a few limitations on how that is made available. You can develop full blown iPhone and iPad apps right there on the device on an iPad using Swift Playgrounds. There are numerous third party development environments available that run on the iPhone and iPad, in languages like Python, Lua and Basic, some of which you can even publish to the App Store. I’ve been programming little game in Pythonista for my kids for years. So sure there are some limitations, but also a lot of flexibility. These devices are actually highly programmable.

Tijdreiziger 4y ago
I would call that 'somewhat programmable' at best, but certainly not 'highly' so.
- simonh 4y ago
  You don't get full access down to the hardware level, but equally the contention that these aren't general purpose computing devices and aren't programmable is just tosh. They're far more programmable, in the sense you can learn a huge amount more about programming on them, than the home microcomputers I learned to program on as a kid.
  - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
    I guess I'm a bit younger than you, but on the computers I grew up with (Windows/Ubuntu/OS X), you were (and are) able to create and run any program you wanted. On an iPhone or iPad, however, you are limited to a sandbox; programs you write on it run strictly within the context of the IDE, and if you want to write any first-class programs (apps), you need to pay up. In high school, I had a friend who was very talented at Game Maker, and he could compile his games as executables and distribute them to us via e-mail. That's impossible on an iPhone.
    - ihatepython 4y ago
      I'm probably older than you, but I agree with you and disagree with the other guy. I grew up with a C64 and Amiga, and that's where I learned how to program, I feel like it gave me a deep understanding of how to program and how a computer worked, plus they were also basically real-time machines. But peak iPhone for me was a jailbroken device running iOS 5 or 6. Back then, everything was still Objective-C, which meant that every object could be introspected in the live system and swizzled which allowed for making tweaks to the actual system. You also had Unix underneath and could login to a bash shell and install a compiler. But someone who learns to program Swift on an iPhone or iPad simply won't have a deep understanding of how anything works. Even if you pay the $99, it's still a rather unpleasant experience to program on iOS given all the restrictions.

by simonh 4y ago

Tijdreiziger 4y ago

I would call that 'somewhat programmable' at best, but certainly not 'highly' so.

simonh 4y ago
You don't get full access down to the hardware level, but equally the contention that these aren't general purpose computing devices and aren't programmable is just tosh. They're far more programmable, in the sense you can learn a huge amount more about programming on them, than the home microcomputers I learned to program on as a kid.
- Tijdreiziger 4y ago
  I guess I'm a bit younger than you, but on the computers I grew up with (Windows/Ubuntu/OS X), you were (and are) able to create and run any program you wanted. On an iPhone or iPad, however, you are limited to a sandbox; programs you write on it run strictly within the context of the IDE, and if you want to write any first-class programs (apps), you need to pay up. In high school, I had a friend who was very talented at Game Maker, and he could compile his games as executables and distribute them to us via e-mail. That's impossible on an iPhone.
  - ihatepython 4y ago
    I'm probably older than you, but I agree with you and disagree with the other guy. I grew up with a C64 and Amiga, and that's where I learned how to program, I feel like it gave me a deep understanding of how to program and how a computer worked, plus they were also basically real-time machines. But peak iPhone for me was a jailbroken device running iOS 5 or 6. Back then, everything was still Objective-C, which meant that every object could be introspected in the live system and swizzled which allowed for making tweaks to the actual system. You also had Unix underneath and could login to a bash shell and install a compiler. But someone who learns to program Swift on an iPhone or iPad simply won't have a deep understanding of how anything works. Even if you pay the $99, it's still a rather unpleasant experience to program on iOS given all the restrictions.