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Comment by porcoda | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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