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Comment by stetrain | Hacker News Reader

- Swift Playgrounds supports coding, running, and submitting iOS apps to the app store.

- Pythonista is a python IDE for iOS

- iSH Shell is an emulated x86 terminal environment

I still wish they would allow a full dev sandbox on iPad. It can be fully isolated from the root filesystem, I just want to have a terminal, local git repos, and be able to point a text editor at it.

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Isn’t pythonista abandonware? Last time I checked the forums for it there were a number of posts about it not getting updates for at least 2 years. It’s a real shame since it’s a nice piece of work that would be great to have actively maintained and updated.

Basically, yeah. Pyto is good and getting better. I recommend it over Pythonista to everyone who wants to run Python natively and doesn't already have a bunch of Pythonista code to support.

The main difference is in the UI libraries each app provides, which aren't cross-compatible. If you want to run plain text-based Python and work with a REPL, they feel very similar. Pyto ship with Python 3.10, though.

I find Pyto to be really unstable and it tends to crash a lot even when doing basic things and following the examples provided.

In the past I tried to report bugs to the developer but never got any reply

I don’t use it regularly, but it worked well enough when I was pushing it pretty hard a while back. Rats. So now we’re back to 0 modern, stable Pythons on iPad?

Oof those recent reviews though… are you still using it regularly without much issue?

Wow, I see what you mean. No, I haven’t used it much recently. I don’t know what I’d recommend today after reading those reviews.

It runs perfectly. It may not be fair to criticize for lack of major updates. I don’t much like Python but I have bought both versions of Pythonista-really a nice product.

It’s using an EOL version of python. Keeping it up to date to use at bare minimum a version that isn’t EOL (even if it isn’t the latest version) would be nice. Heck, I’d happily pay periodically for major updates since I’m not expecting free work for a product I value and paid for in the first place. It’s a fair criticism if an app is part of an evolving ecosystem (eg, python) and just stops keeping up: slowly but surely it skews further from what people are expecting, what practices are currently in use and those that have been abandoned by the community, etc.

What I don’t understand is why people who have popular apps and decide to stop working on them don’t sell them so someone else can keep them alive. Pythonista is awesome, and lots of people use it. I’m sure someone out there would happily step up to help keep it alive or take it over.

Are you using the Python 2, or the newer Python 3 version?

The Python 3 version uses Python 3.6 which is no longer supported by the Python team as of 5 months ago.

OK, thanks, I didn’t realize that.

I remember the author was suffering from mental illness for a while. He updated the app after a recovery.

Are you seriously suggesting Pythonista for python development? You can’t even ‘pip install’ with it!

This is not a setup for serious development.

The comment I replied to seemed to think coding was strictly not possible on the platform, so I listed some options for local coding. Honestly I think if someone was serious about using an iPad to develop I would use a remote environment like Github Codespaces or http://vscode.dev/ but others had already covered those options.

I agree that the current solutions aren’t great, thus the second part of my comment wishing for a real on-device dev sandbox which would solve many of those issues.

Thanks for clarifying. I’m hoping that coding in the cloud, GitHub codespaces, becomes a highly productive experience soon. It’s pretty close.

I would recommend avoiding Pythonista myself as it is abandonware but that has been possible for a long time via stash which is still actively developed https://github.com/ywangd/stash

there are a few other python environments that support pip install

It used to be so good five or so years ago, I remember being so excited about it and even writing so nice little scripts in it. It's sad that it's in the state it is now

Who gets to decide what it serious? Many people are happy to code with what it offers in the box.

Who gets to decide anything? We might as well not speak at all, lest we share spme opinion that's counter to what some other person believes - and some people will believe anything, even that the earth is flat or that crocs are stylish.

Back in real life, however, a Python programming environment limited to "just what it offers in the box" might make some "happy", but it's very easy to argue that it's not serious.

For the person that decides to use it, it is serious enough.

Do you mean the "real life" where UNIX CLI stuff gets cargo culted as the only way a developer works?

iSH is horribly slow and not really useful to me for a lot of things.

iSH is a great tool, but it's not a general purpose replacement for a shell.

I tried running git clone <some reasonably sized project> and ish died.

I am interested in helping out with iSH development, but it isn't really viable at the moment. It's claim to fame is a partial JIT that runs legally despite apple's jit restrictions

Codea is a really nice lua development environment for the iPad and can also be used to create App Store apps (though you need to use Xcode to build the app bundle). There are quite a few others but I think Codea is noteworthy.

Honestly the whoLe ‘I wish I could code on my iPad’ thing and complaining kids can’t learn to code on them, has been tired for a very, very long time. Many of these dev environments came out more than 10 years ago now. Being able to develop in swift and publish to the App Store directly for the device for free was announced at WWDC and released last year, but people still keep moaning about it. Pay attention people!

I still can't feasibly code and build things in an arbitrary language of my choice. I like my iPad Pro quite a bit but the only way I can do the type of web app dev I normally do through it is by remoting.

I don't believe there are any well-established general text editors that offers decent git and text editing. Syntax highlighting for a few langs, etc.

And then language runtimes. I do Elixir so I need Erlang plus Elixir. The machine could run those fine but I don't think you would be allowed to ship those via Apple's store.

Plenty of limitations. Kids can probably learn to code on them, depending on what they want and like. The argumenta may be tired but so are the unsolved unsolved problems I feel.

Of course it has limitations, sure. iPads aren’t general purpose, open systems. That’s just not in their nature. They’re still programmable though and there are many options for doing so.

Koder and Textastic are pretty comprehensive coding editors. Working Copy is the premiere git client and works well with both.

What you suggest are not what people are actually complaining about. Those suggested dev environments are very constrained

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