We could turn lots of older phones into portable toy dev platforms for the next gen of programmers.
10 minutes searching: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.krazeapps....
There's also termux and it's predecessors, running debian rootfs with or without root. (Most of them based on proot).
Before proot, there were some manually ported GCC and friends.
Some years ago, I had an android 5 phone and hacked up a fakechroot'ed debian rootfs on a terminal emulator without root. Basically unpacking some debian .debs with statically linked busybox binary, then using a chain of LD_PRELOAD hacks to call a shell with a shim.
But proot is better solution (ptrace instead of shim), and termux is very well done.
On the other hand, if you're thinking about scripting without all the hassle of Unix, I saw an app for experimenting with Android APIs using beanshell [1], I made an attempt to create a modern clone for my Android course project this year, but couldn't take it much far due to shortage of time.
It's worth pointing out that no CPUs took offense.