Hacker News Reader

Comment by chipsy | Hacker News Reader

I remember trying this one and thinking that the language was fine(it is literally an update from the makers of the Atari 8-bit BASIC) but the UI is unsuitable as it uses generic Android text input, the same flaw shared by most every other on-device IDE I've tried. That doesn't just mean that it's crude, it's also buggy - the view desynchronizes when editing large bodies of text using that text control.

What touchscreen programming needs is a really polished touchscreen UI, and that challenges the whole assumption of a text editor being ergonomically optimal.

View on HN

I have tried two approaches to address these problems: "Pure" graphical programming (http://flowgrid.org) and collapsed function declarations, avoiding large text bodies (although for JS, not BASIC: https://tidejnet.appspot.com/v3/). Both are still prototype-ish, but if you take a look, let me know what you think should be improved..

Lisping is a very good example on iOS of coding with touch.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lisping/id512138518?mt=8

I am yet to find something similar on Android.

How about https://mad.cs.fau.de/fasl/?

Unfortunately, the development seems to have completely stalled and the site's partially dead, but it's still in the Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.fau.cs.mad...., and the source's on Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/mad_fau/fasl

Doesn't look as user friendly.

Check the iPad screenshots, https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lisping/id512138518?mt=8#

However I never tried it, just saw a demo of it a while back.

I think LISP is an excellent fit for the poor text input facilities that touchscreens offer.

Structuring, wrapping an navigating code bodies is very easy, thanks to the simple syntax structure of the language, and you need very few uncommon characters (parens, quotes and dashes being the most common ones), buttons for which would easily be fitted into the touchscreen UI.

auto-completion is also pretty simple, since most of the time the first entry of a non-quoted list will be a function listed somewhere near in a defun, and other entries will often be an identifier nearby. Other cases, such as constants, new identifiers or unknown functions, will need more input work from the user, but this is still feasible.

Yes, but there is other area that I think it keeps unexplored, taking advantage of writing recognition to write programs.

Just writing down as one would be on a piece of paper.

Many tablets have their algorithms quite good nowadays and yet developers use them to create ToDo list apps.

There is just a few Android apps I know that make use of it for drawing diagrams.

I desperately wish there was an Android port of Lisping. I want it badly, but iOS devices are ludicrously expensive in my country.

In the interim, I've found hacked (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hackedapp), while a game, I think actually does a pretty good job as an interface. It's largely pleasant to work with, save that I would prefer to be able to name my own vars. The game itself jumps in difficulty rather quickly though, by chapter 3 or 4 you are already asked to write a sort algorithm in what is a pretty restricted language.

On Windows Phone I was also really impressed with Touch C (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps/touch-c/9wzdncrdr...) as an interface, it's just a shame that the implementation was so buggy and incomplete.

Microsoft has something like that: https://www.touchdevelop.com/ People have also built tools off of Google Blockly: https://developers.google.com/blockly/about/showcase

Reply on news.ycombinator.com