Hacker News Reader

Comment by sangnoir | Hacker News Reader

I find this program ironic since Apple locks down iDevices pretty hard - their App Store rules prohibit coding[1] on iPhones & iPads. If anyone were to attempt to make an interpreter/port Scratch or Python to iOS, the app would not be approved.

1. §3.3.2 An Application may not download or install executable code. Interpreted code may only be used in an Application if all scripts, code and interpreters are packaged in the Application and not downloaded.

View on HN

Perhaps you haven't heard about Pythonista, which is a full Python programming environment available on the App Store. Now there's also Playgrounds, which is a Swift programming environment that comes with the iOS 10 beta and runs on the iPad (you can even invoke iOS frameworks, apparently) — yes, this is from Apple itself, and yes, they're bending their own rules. But your original statement is not strictly true.

There has always been things like Codea as well, for a long time now:

[1] http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/

In what way are they bending their own rules? The application comes with it's own Swift compiler and exposes only the public APIs.

Nothing Pythonista couldn't do already.

Pythonista cannot open code from other apps so all code has to originate in the app (other than copy-paste).

Swift Playgrounds can round-trip with XCode.

Pythonista can invoke iOS frameworks too[1].

1: https://files.grid.in.th/7KXJ4O.jpg (from Pythonista's examples)

That seems like a bit of a red herring. What does blocking the downloading of code have to do with offering coding camps?

Regardless, I don't think the kids need to worry about that until they offer the Corporate Strategems Bootcamp. Until then, pretty sure if the kids want to create apps that download executable code, they can install them on their device directly with xcode.

> That seems like a bit of a red herring. What does blocking the downloading of code have to do with offering coding camps?

How does a kid share? This type of thing is important. Everyone can see the athlete play, hear the singer singing, but how does a young coder get notices if no code can be shared?

Ideally, one kid should be able to "flip / slide" his/her project onto another kids iPad with a option to put a link in the iCloud. Otherwise, its just a solitary activity with no social reward.

> How does a kid share? This type of thing is important. Everyone can see the athlete play, hear the singer singing, but how does a young coder get notices if no code can be shared?

For the very specific case of apps that download executable code off the network. So it's more like, athletes that play a specific sport, or a singer that sings very specific class of music.

> if no code can be shared

Now that's just either fud or a lie.

There's also Codea, which runs Lua. The company that built Codea also made a game with it called Cargo Bot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com