5 ms·

The answer is obvious - most people don’t want to do this. They want to text or call a friend, look up the weather or sports, stream some entertainment or read

The answer is obvious - most people don’t want to do this. They want to text or call a friend, look up the weather or sports, stream some entertainment or read the news. They’re experts in their own domains and don’t have the time or inclination to learn programming. There’s some heavy condescension in this thread, claiming that not programming “keeps people stupid”. As if creating can only happen in an IDE and not in ProCreate or iMovie. It would help if programmers like us eased up on everyone else. Not everyone needs to be exactly like us. Also, you have to be living under a literal rock if you’ve missed the potential impact of LLMs, specifically chatGPT plugins. Once that’s generally available, everyone can tell the LLM what they want in their native language and have it done. Everyone can build custom recipes that combine multiple apps and APIs in novel ways to get stuff done. That’s a revolution waiting to happen - where everyone will be limited only by their imagination, not by their knowledge of programming. And it’ll happen without having to show every smartphone user a BASIC terminal.

Sharlin 4y ago
> and not in ProCreate or iMovie. Or – gasp – Instagram or TikTok! — I just listened to a radio show where they talked about how easy it is to create (rap music and music videos in this case) these days, as all you need is your phone rather than expensive devices and desktop applications.
- ungamedplayer 4y ago
  Phone made rap sounds like hot garbage though.
polishdude20 4y ago
Yeah and to add to this: People, in general, want to connect with other people. Programming is a means to that end. Only for a small part of the population is programming in itself an end.
- iamdamian 4y ago
  > Only for a small part of the population is programming in itself an end. What about in absolute terms? How many millions of developers would write or run code on their phone / tablet if they could?
- wruza 4y ago
  Idk, I just want to set two timers at the same time by tapping a custom button, and also make an “app” to open a gate for a delivery guy. And other simple stuff that doesn’t require a CS degree. I believe that when someone’s idea of what people want equals to the status quo, they just talk out of their Stockholm’s.
  - Jetrel 4y ago
    That's fully possible, even easy, on an iOS device. --- The kind of programming people are agitating for in threads like these is emphatically NOT general-purpose programming. It's a very specific kind of proto-programming - being able to write direct inputs in exactly the kind of way you'd write software in the 1980s; a core example being the ability to write for a built-in BASIC interpreter, right on the commandline. Plot twist: that shit's useless. I grew up in that era, and that kind of programming is a toy. You can write gimmicky little things like outputting text in various colors, or at extraordinary expense, you can use these incredibly basic building-blocks to jerry-rig higher-level constructs to actually accomplish something meaningful. It's an incredibly damning indictment that most of the successful pieces of software from that era started by bootstrapping their way out of having to do direct "dos/apple console" programming and wrote a high-level interpreter for something better so they didn't have to deal with that; every major title did something like its own virtual machine (c.f. lucasarts games), its own lisp interpreter, etc. It doesn't teach you to program; it teaches you to bootstrap language interpreters — if you get incredibly lucky and figure that out on your own. The other "99% of space marines get attrited in training"; the other 99% of aspiring programmers from that era never figured that out, and gave up at the blinkenlights stage, without ever building an actual piece of software, or really getting their machine to actually do anything. I use that example to illustrate the absurdity: the WH40K trope is meant to be satire, because that level of attrition in any field is just a bafflingly wasteful way to elevate people to higher skillsets. Survivor bias may make heroes out of the tiny minority of people who actually made it (the Jordan Mechners of the world), but the cost in people who never "break through" isn't worth it. I'd rather teach people to actually program. Teaching them to build the ingredients for programming (not the universal ingredients, but just the ingredients to enable it on one very particular kind of host medium) isn't it. My regard to that "programming" era is: "rest in piss, you won't be missed".
diego_moita 4y ago
It is more than obvious if you look at the broad picture: computers on the 80s were sold to a few million people, most of them with, at least, high school degree and math inclinations (a.k.a. "nerds"). Smartphones, o.t.o.h. are sold to billions of people. The scale is just immense and is a completely different audience.
- DerekL 4y ago
  But even then, most of the time computers were used to run programs written by others, such as spreadsheets, word processors, and games. (Though a spreadsheet can be thought of as a specialized type of program.)
- masklinn 4y ago
  An other component is that computers in the 80s largely did not have the power to hide their workings from users. In fact the cheaper ones required basic knowledge of operations in order to just use otherwise they were glorified heaters.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- zamnos 4y ago
  The other thing about computers in the 80's is that Internet access back then was a rarity. So the question, as asked (and answered by most of the comments), includes an implicity purity test - that only on-device programming is "real" programming and that programming on the Internet "doesn't count" for some reason. Yet between glitch.com, jsfiddle, etc, there's a whole slew of accessible programming environments available. I can low-code up some Zapier zaps and a Stripe checkout page, which is enough to get an MVP if you've found your niche customers. Yeah, it's a different world than on-device compilers on back in the 80's but we're not programming in the 80's any more either. Hell, Stack Overflow didn't come about until 2008. Try telling people you learned to program before Stack Overflow (and Google, for that matter).
amelius 4y ago
> The answer is obvious - most people don’t want to do this. There are still millions of people who want to do this. The question is more: why do phone companies actively discourage it?
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Because they're selling to the least common denominator, not to a niche of power users. With time the power will be more evenly distributed. But that will probably require new methods and tooling that haven't even been invented yet.
- great_psy 4y ago
  Have you played around with the shortcuts app on the iPhone ? It is pretty powerful for something that is highly constrained to a few select operations. It’s not full out programming but it is a good entry way once you are done with scratch.
- tdeck 4y ago
  By "phone companies" you really mean Apple. You can do this easily in Android, there are even full-blown IDEs for various languages in the Play store. Google created App Inventor as an entry-level way of doing this. None of this seems to be particularly popular but it's an option.
  - kfir 4y ago
    Are you familiar with swift playground? https://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/ https://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/
    - tdeck 4y ago
      I wasn't but this looks fun!
  - DerekL 4y ago
    They're on iOS too. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22IDE%22+apps+on+iOS+app+store&norw=1&t=hi&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22IDE%22+apps+on+iOS+app+store&no...
aswanson 4y ago
Facts. I like retro computing and have dozens of old processors I want to kit up and build tools for. But that's just me. To expect most people to want to do stuff like that would not make sense.
Herval_freire 4y ago
[dead]
dehrmann 4y ago
I work in tech as a software engineer and I (mostly) don't want to do this. I want my phone to work out of the box. The other thing I'd add is that even when I want to write a mobile app, doing it on the device itself would be a nightmare. Composing emails is already hard enough.
- wruza 4y ago
  I (mostly) don't want to do this. I want my phone to work out of the box. Software working out of the box and programming aren’t mutually exclusive.
- acomjean 4y ago
  If I wanted to write a mobile app for an apple device I really can’t do a native one as I run Linux on my computers. Yeah there’s flutter or react for app development. But it’s just different. Samsung has a thing called “dex” that allows your smartphone to hook up to an external monitor, as does the steam deck. These machines are powerful enough to develop on, they’re just locked down enough
  - perryizgr8 4y ago
    You can run full blown VS code on Dex. It is quite slow on my S10, but this is a 4 year old phone now.
- easrng 4y ago
  ehh i do dev on my phone sometimes (Termux and sometimes in-browser editors) and it's an ok experience imo
- dTal 4y ago
  This kinda begs the question. Yeah, writing a smartphone app is already painful, and doing it that way on the device would be ridiculously more painful. Is that an inherent property of the form factor, or the result of systematically orienting the system towards consumption? I say the latter. I used to program with great facility in BASIC on my calculator in high school. I was not even the only one who could do this. The input methods available were much less rich than what a smartphone can provide, not to mention the display. Now, in 2023, the easiest way to write simple programs on my phone is by emulating that calculator. Come on!
throwaway4aday 4y ago
I think your obvious answer is wrong. The fact is that modern smartphones are walled gardens with very large, powerful gatekeepers who want to protect their duopoly. The original impetus behind locking down the operating systems on smartphones was security but it evolved into a perfect way to ensure control over their market. There are no generic PC clones in the cellphone market, only small hobbyist or niche products that barely work. A+G encourage programming for their OSs only in so far as the output of such an activity can be sold on their app stores where they can take their cut and still retain absolute control over what gets installed. In regards to plugins, someone has to write them. Even if the people writing those plugins use LLM tools to assist them they still need to know how to put software together and how to manage all of the services that those APIs talk to and how to scale their infrastructure along with user growth.
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  I'm not sure that's true. AFAIK even Apple allows bundled interpreters for educational purposes on the App Store. There are tons of ways to program on both mobile platforms. Here's just a random example, a full python environment for iPhone/iPad: https://pyto.app/ https://pyto.app/
- lozenge 4y ago
  The speed you can input data into a smartphone just isn't conducive to creating anything. It isn't a grand conspiracy. On my computer I've never created something with the same screen size as the intended viewer.
  - comfypotato 4y ago
    I read the comments until I found this one. There’s something to be said for not needing the blazing speed of vim/Emacs, because most of the work is thinking, but smartphones are so far on the opposite end of the spectrum that the input and interaction with the dev environment is prohibitive. I think this is the key problem, no more no less. If I had a decent keyboard I would be much more inclined to write software on my phone. Come on, there isn’t even a shift key, led along the other modifiers.
eimrine 4y ago
> As if creating can only happen in an IDE and not in ProCreate or iMovie. Short answer is yes. Don't you see how much video environment sucks to text environment? You can not do science in ProCreate or iMovie.
- KyeRussell 4y ago
  Nobody that “does science” says “do science”. This just feels like you’re advocating for some nebulous form of “real work”. Check your priors.
  - eimrine 4y ago
    The fact that smartphones encourage video creating and not encourage programming is the essence of the topic. Also smartphones discourage to have a "real talk" because of touchscreen is better to spam animated smiles instead of text. Also smartphones discourage to use a "real software" because they are shaped to be an environment for spyware. Also smartphones discourage to use a "real web-browser" because apps are just "more native" webpages without tabs, scale, ability to change fonts and all the nativeness is about to steal as much data as possible. What can I do to stop the conception of "real work" to be nebulous?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
shrimp_emoji 4y ago
The devices also inherently bar you from doing this even if you wanted. Mobile text editors play ads before opening a new tab or loading a file. They're devices for consoomer cattle. (To paraphrase Terry Davis.)
cudgy 4y ago
“you have to be living under a literal rock if you’ve missed the potential impact of LLMs” Isn’t this statement condescending, which you criticize the article of doing?

Sharlin 4y ago

> and not in ProCreate or iMovie. Or – gasp – Instagram or TikTok! — I just listened to a radio show where they talked about how easy it is to create (rap music and music videos in this case) these days, as all you need is your phone rather than expensive devices and desktop applications.

ungamedplayer 4y ago
Phone made rap sounds like hot garbage though.

polishdude20 4y ago

Yeah and to add to this: People, in general, want to connect with other people. Programming is a means to that end. Only for a small part of the population is programming in itself an end.

iamdamian 4y ago
> Only for a small part of the population is programming in itself an end. What about in absolute terms? How many millions of developers would write or run code on their phone / tablet if they could?
wruza 4y ago
Idk, I just want to set two timers at the same time by tapping a custom button, and also make an “app” to open a gate for a delivery guy. And other simple stuff that doesn’t require a CS degree. I believe that when someone’s idea of what people want equals to the status quo, they just talk out of their Stockholm’s.
- Jetrel 4y ago
  That's fully possible, even easy, on an iOS device. --- The kind of programming people are agitating for in threads like these is emphatically NOT general-purpose programming. It's a very specific kind of proto-programming - being able to write direct inputs in exactly the kind of way you'd write software in the 1980s; a core example being the ability to write for a built-in BASIC interpreter, right on the commandline. Plot twist: that shit's useless. I grew up in that era, and that kind of programming is a toy. You can write gimmicky little things like outputting text in various colors, or at extraordinary expense, you can use these incredibly basic building-blocks to jerry-rig higher-level constructs to actually accomplish something meaningful. It's an incredibly damning indictment that most of the successful pieces of software from that era started by bootstrapping their way out of having to do direct "dos/apple console" programming and wrote a high-level interpreter for something better so they didn't have to deal with that; every major title did something like its own virtual machine (c.f. lucasarts games), its own lisp interpreter, etc. It doesn't teach you to program; it teaches you to bootstrap language interpreters — if you get incredibly lucky and figure that out on your own. The other "99% of space marines get attrited in training"; the other 99% of aspiring programmers from that era never figured that out, and gave up at the blinkenlights stage, without ever building an actual piece of software, or really getting their machine to actually do anything. I use that example to illustrate the absurdity: the WH40K trope is meant to be satire, because that level of attrition in any field is just a bafflingly wasteful way to elevate people to higher skillsets. Survivor bias may make heroes out of the tiny minority of people who actually made it (the Jordan Mechners of the world), but the cost in people who never "break through" isn't worth it. I'd rather teach people to actually program. Teaching them to build the ingredients for programming (not the universal ingredients, but just the ingredients to enable it on one very particular kind of host medium) isn't it. My regard to that "programming" era is: "rest in piss, you won't be missed".

diego_moita 4y ago

It is more than obvious if you look at the broad picture: computers on the 80s were sold to a few million people, most of them with, at least, high school degree and math inclinations (a.k.a. "nerds"). Smartphones, o.t.o.h. are sold to billions of people. The scale is just immense and is a completely different audience.

DerekL 4y ago
But even then, most of the time computers were used to run programs written by others, such as spreadsheets, word processors, and games. (Though a spreadsheet can be thought of as a specialized type of program.)
masklinn 4y ago
An other component is that computers in the 80s largely did not have the power to hide their workings from users. In fact the cheaper ones required basic knowledge of operations in order to just use otherwise they were glorified heaters.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
zamnos 4y ago
The other thing about computers in the 80's is that Internet access back then was a rarity. So the question, as asked (and answered by most of the comments), includes an implicity purity test - that only on-device programming is "real" programming and that programming on the Internet "doesn't count" for some reason. Yet between glitch.com, jsfiddle, etc, there's a whole slew of accessible programming environments available. I can low-code up some Zapier zaps and a Stripe checkout page, which is enough to get an MVP if you've found your niche customers. Yeah, it's a different world than on-device compilers on back in the 80's but we're not programming in the 80's any more either. Hell, Stack Overflow didn't come about until 2008. Try telling people you learned to program before Stack Overflow (and Google, for that matter).

amelius 4y ago

> The answer is obvious - most people don’t want to do this. There are still millions of people who want to do this. The question is more: why do phone companies actively discourage it?

paulryanrogers 4y ago
Because they're selling to the least common denominator, not to a niche of power users. With time the power will be more evenly distributed. But that will probably require new methods and tooling that haven't even been invented yet.
great_psy 4y ago
Have you played around with the shortcuts app on the iPhone ? It is pretty powerful for something that is highly constrained to a few select operations. It’s not full out programming but it is a good entry way once you are done with scratch.
tdeck 4y ago
By "phone companies" you really mean Apple. You can do this easily in Android, there are even full-blown IDEs for various languages in the Play store. Google created App Inventor as an entry-level way of doing this. None of this seems to be particularly popular but it's an option.
- kfir 4y ago
  Are you familiar with swift playground? https://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/ https://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/
  - tdeck 4y ago
    I wasn't but this looks fun!
- DerekL 4y ago
  They're on iOS too. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22IDE%22+apps+on+iOS+app+store&norw=1&t=hi&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22IDE%22+apps+on+iOS+app+store&no...

aswanson 4y ago

Facts. I like retro computing and have dozens of old processors I want to kit up and build tools for. But that's just me. To expect most people to want to do stuff like that would not make sense.

Herval_freire 4y ago

[dead]

dehrmann 4y ago

I work in tech as a software engineer and I (mostly) don't want to do this. I want my phone to work out of the box. The other thing I'd add is that even when I want to write a mobile app, doing it on the device itself would be a nightmare. Composing emails is already hard enough.

wruza 4y ago
I (mostly) don't want to do this. I want my phone to work out of the box. Software working out of the box and programming aren’t mutually exclusive.
acomjean 4y ago
If I wanted to write a mobile app for an apple device I really can’t do a native one as I run Linux on my computers. Yeah there’s flutter or react for app development. But it’s just different. Samsung has a thing called “dex” that allows your smartphone to hook up to an external monitor, as does the steam deck. These machines are powerful enough to develop on, they’re just locked down enough
- perryizgr8 4y ago
  You can run full blown VS code on Dex. It is quite slow on my S10, but this is a 4 year old phone now.
easrng 4y ago
ehh i do dev on my phone sometimes (Termux and sometimes in-browser editors) and it's an ok experience imo
dTal 4y ago
This kinda begs the question. Yeah, writing a smartphone app is already painful, and doing it that way on the device would be ridiculously more painful. Is that an inherent property of the form factor, or the result of systematically orienting the system towards consumption? I say the latter. I used to program with great facility in BASIC on my calculator in high school. I was not even the only one who could do this. The input methods available were much less rich than what a smartphone can provide, not to mention the display. Now, in 2023, the easiest way to write simple programs on my phone is by emulating that calculator. Come on!

throwaway4aday 4y ago

I think your obvious answer is wrong. The fact is that modern smartphones are walled gardens with very large, powerful gatekeepers who want to protect their duopoly. The original impetus behind locking down the operating systems on smartphones was security but it evolved into a perfect way to ensure control over their market. There are no generic PC clones in the cellphone market, only small hobbyist or niche products that barely work. A+G encourage programming for their OSs only in so far as the output of such an activity can be sold on their app stores where they can take their cut and still retain absolute control over what gets installed. In regards to plugins, someone has to write them. Even if the people writing those plugins use LLM tools to assist them they still need to know how to put software together and how to manage all of the services that those APIs talk to and how to scale their infrastructure along with user growth.

mardifoufs 4y ago
I'm not sure that's true. AFAIK even Apple allows bundled interpreters for educational purposes on the App Store. There are tons of ways to program on both mobile platforms. Here's just a random example, a full python environment for iPhone/iPad: https://pyto.app/ https://pyto.app/
lozenge 4y ago
The speed you can input data into a smartphone just isn't conducive to creating anything. It isn't a grand conspiracy. On my computer I've never created something with the same screen size as the intended viewer.
- comfypotato 4y ago
  I read the comments until I found this one. There’s something to be said for not needing the blazing speed of vim/Emacs, because most of the work is thinking, but smartphones are so far on the opposite end of the spectrum that the input and interaction with the dev environment is prohibitive. I think this is the key problem, no more no less. If I had a decent keyboard I would be much more inclined to write software on my phone. Come on, there isn’t even a shift key, led along the other modifiers.

eimrine 4y ago

> As if creating can only happen in an IDE and not in ProCreate or iMovie. Short answer is yes. Don't you see how much video environment sucks to text environment? You can not do science in ProCreate or iMovie.

KyeRussell 4y ago
Nobody that “does science” says “do science”. This just feels like you’re advocating for some nebulous form of “real work”. Check your priors.
- eimrine 4y ago
  The fact that smartphones encourage video creating and not encourage programming is the essence of the topic. Also smartphones discourage to have a "real talk" because of touchscreen is better to spam animated smiles instead of text. Also smartphones discourage to use a "real software" because they are shaped to be an environment for spyware. Also smartphones discourage to use a "real web-browser" because apps are just "more native" webpages without tabs, scale, ability to change fonts and all the nativeness is about to steal as much data as possible. What can I do to stop the conception of "real work" to be nebulous?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

shrimp_emoji 4y ago

The devices also inherently bar you from doing this even if you wanted. Mobile text editors play ads before opening a new tab or loading a file. They're devices for consoomer cattle. (To paraphrase Terry Davis.)

cudgy 4y ago

“you have to be living under a literal rock if you’ve missed the potential impact of LLMs” Isn’t this statement condescending, which you criticize the article of doing?