Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?
Early 80s computers start up with a BASIC prompt and hence encourage you to learn programming right away.
Why don't smartphones do something similar?
Why don't smartphones do something similar?
There’s some heavy condescension in this thread, claiming that not programming “keeps people stupid”. As if creating can only happen in an IDE and not in ProCreate or iMovie. It would help if programmers like us eased up on everyone else. Not everyone needs to be exactly like us.
Also, you have to be living under a literal rock if you’ve missed the potential impact of LLMs, specifically chatGPT plugins. Once that’s generally available, everyone can tell the LLM what they want in their native language and have it done. Everyone can build custom recipes that combine multiple apps and APIs in novel ways to get stuff done. That’s a revolution waiting to happen - where everyone will be limited only by their imagination, not by their knowledge of programming. And it’ll happen without having to show every smartphone user a BASIC terminal.
Or – gasp – Instagram or TikTok!
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I just listened to a radio show where they talked about how easy it is to create (rap music and music videos in this case) these days, as all you need is your phone rather than expensive devices and desktop applications.
What about in absolute terms? How many millions of developers would write or run code on their phone / tablet if they could?
I believe that when someone’s idea of what people want equals to the status quo, they just talk out of their Stockholm’s.
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The kind of programming people are agitating for in threads like these is emphatically NOT general-purpose programming. It's a very specific kind of proto-programming - being able to write direct inputs in exactly the kind of way you'd write software in the 1980s; a core example being the ability to write for a built-in BASIC interpreter, right on the commandline.
Plot twist: that shit's useless.
I grew up in that era, and that kind of programming is a toy. You can write gimmicky little things like outputting text in various colors, or at extraordinary expense, you can use these incredibly basic building-blocks to jerry-rig higher-level constructs to actually accomplish something meaningful.
It's an incredibly damning indictment that most of the successful pieces of software from that era started by bootstrapping their way out of having to do direct "dos/apple console" programming and wrote a high-level interpreter for something better so they didn't have to deal with that; every major title did something like its own virtual machine (c.f. lucasarts games), its own lisp interpreter, etc.
It doesn't teach you to program; it teaches you to bootstrap language interpreters — if you get incredibly lucky and figure that out on your own. The other "99% of space marines get attrited in training"; the other 99% of aspiring programmers from that era never figured that out, and gave up at the blinkenlights stage, without ever building an actual piece of software, or really getting their machine to actually do anything. I use that example to illustrate the absurdity: the WH40K trope is meant to be satire, because that level of attrition in any field is just a bafflingly wasteful way to elevate people to higher skillsets. Survivor bias may make heroes out of the tiny minority of people who actually made it (the Jordan Mechners of the world), but the cost in people who never "break through" isn't worth it.
I'd rather teach people to actually program. Teaching them to build the ingredients for programming (not the universal ingredients, but just the ingredients to enable it on one very particular kind of host medium) isn't it.
My regard to that "programming" era is: "rest in piss, you won't be missed".
The scale is just immense and is a completely different audience.
Yeah, it's a different world than on-device compilers on back in the 80's but we're not programming in the 80's any more either. Hell, Stack Overflow didn't come about until 2008. Try telling people you learned to program before Stack Overflow (and Google, for that matter).
There are still millions of people who want to do this.
The question is more: why do phone companies actively discourage it?
It’s not full out programming but it is a good entry way once you are done with scratch.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22IDE%22+apps+on+iOS+app+store&no...
The other thing I'd add is that even when I want to write a mobile app, doing it on the device itself would be a nightmare. Composing emails is already hard enough.
Software working out of the box and programming aren’t mutually exclusive.
Yeah there’s flutter or react for app development. But it’s just different.
Samsung has a thing called “dex” that allows your smartphone to hook up to an external monitor, as does the steam deck. These machines are powerful enough to develop on, they’re just locked down enough
I say the latter. I used to program with great facility in BASIC on my calculator in high school. I was not even the only one who could do this. The input methods available were much less rich than what a smartphone can provide, not to mention the display. Now, in 2023, the easiest way to write simple programs on my phone is by emulating that calculator. Come on!
To the original question, table stakes are an order of magnitude greater than when 80's computers booted to a Basic prompt.
In regards to plugins, someone has to write them. Even if the people writing those plugins use LLM tools to assist them they still need to know how to put software together and how to manage all of the services that those APIs talk to and how to scale their infrastructure along with user growth.
Here's just a random example, a full python environment for iPhone/iPad:
I think this is the key problem, no more no less. If I had a decent keyboard I would be much more inclined to write software on my phone. Come on, there isn’t even a shift key, led along the other modifiers.
I think people assume that Emacs is a modal editor like Vim but I'm not totally sure why that is.
Otherwise I agree that the mobile input methods are simply too limiting to work with.
Moving around the cursor is pretty difficult and accessing non-alphanumeric symbols sometimes requires clicking the "modifier" thing once or twice.
The on-screen touch-driven keyboard also takes up at least half of the screen, and shrinking it makes hitting a specific key much more difficult.
There is also the difficulty in holding the phone while doing all of this!
On Android you can connect a regular keyboard to the device and use that, then I think working on stuff could be viable!
This is true by default, but many people do use Spacemacs or Emacs with doom mode enabled which does allow vi keybindings, so I think some people associate it with modal editing.
in another way, it is possible to connect a keyboard to cellphone.
> I think your obvious answer is wrong
You are saying this is wrong:
> The answer is obvious - most people don’t want to do this.
You are saying you believe the majority of people *do* want to learn to program?
I’m my eyes the BASIC prompts at startup we’re there because that’s how you had to interact with computers at the time. Seems like the vast majority of people want to use their phones not program them.
Short answer is yes. Don't you see how much video environment sucks to text environment? You can not do science in ProCreate or iMovie.
What can I do to stop the conception of "real work" to be nebulous?
Mobile text editors play ads before opening a new tab or loading a file.
They're devices for consoomer cattle. (To paraphrase Terry Davis.)
Isn’t this statement condescending, which you criticize the article of doing?
Coding requires deep thought, but phones are optimized for moving around rather than sitting in one place and thinking. As such, use cases like maps, calendars, communication and alarms get priority.
The reason people buy a phone is to communicate and get around. And manufacturers cater to those needs.
Something akin to hypercard could be made to work very well on a smartphone, or possibly a dataflow environment like PureData but more general purpose. But yeah, 99% of people just want to use their phone and development for phones is much simpler on a proper computer.
But just watching it causes severe physical pain in me. Everything is awkward, and painful slow. In the time you would have written a page of code on a desktop in an IDE you hardly manage to write a few lines of working code on a phone. Alone the fact that you can't use keyboard shortcuts efficiently is more than crippling! Not to mention the extremely tiny screen on a phone. On a desktop you have for serous work 2, or better 3 screens (or some big wide one), for a reason.
And regarding deep thinking: The best setting for that is imho not the desktop, nor the bed. Best for thinking is actually walking around, while not being distracted by anything else.
Best for thinking is actually walking around, while not being distracted by anything else.
Fwiw my best ideas were born in a bathroom.
Compared to mouse and keyboard it is.
Neither is a calculator.
I tried ssh-ing from my phone once, and it was an absolutely terrible experience.
The key layout on a touchscreen is entirely adaptable though. A language with a custom symbol set designed for small touchscreen entry could perform well.
I’ve long thought that an APL-derived language might be great for phone coding. The custom symbols aren’t a problem on a touchscreen, and the extreme code density means you could fit a lot of meaningful program on a small screen.
However, the phone has the pro that you can have any arbitrary keyboard layout. In that case I think that perhaps APL might be pretty well suited. Perhaps we should design languages around the idea that they should be used on phonescreens, where we don't need to restrict the character set to ASCI?
I have an APL program and I like using it basically like a calculator, but I imagine one could write full programs on a phone, if we did some tweaking to the interface.
Pythonista is probably one of the better ones. http://omz-software.com/pythonista/
Of course smartphones are mainstream so most owners are users not potential developers.. unlike the late 70s/early 80's computer scene which grew out of the hobby electronics scene where the early users were much more technical. My first computer came as a kit - bag of components and a motherboard - had to get out the soldering iron to build it.
* Authoritarian governments don't give their subjects a good civic education because an educated population tends to start demanding more freedoms.
* Industrial barons never wanted their factory workers to learn about unions because once they did, sure enough they wanted to unionize.
* To desire and defend your digital rights you need to understand how the digital world works, and what's at stake. Big tech doesn't want you thinking about uncomfortable things like that. They want you to pay your monthly fees, watch the ads they put in front of you, go to bed and do it all again tomorrow.
Virtually everyone with power, since the beginning of civilization, has preferred for their subjects to be poorly informed about anything that threatens their power.
This seems to have been untrue in the USSR, and it seems currently untrue in China, the first two big authoritarian governments that came to my mind. Also "because" is doing the heavy lifting in your sentence, I do wonder how you arrived at that causality.
Your apologies for some of the greatest criminals in history not withstanding, my original comment referred to the concept of a good civic education. There was some debate in the responses about what that constitutes. I think it includes a comparative analysis of various systems of government and how people under those systems fare. What we can say about the systems in the USSR and China is that as a matter of undisputed fact, people living under those systems are poorer and more likely to be subject to arbitrary detention or execution than the typical citizens of the world's democratic countries. A good civic education will teach that because it is a fact. A bad civic education will use propaganda to conceal facts like those.
Can you imagine school children in China, one of them asks in a political science class "What's wrong with US democracy?" and nobody can give them an answer without first mentioning the genocide of native americans, the mass graves in latin american, the contras, Iraq.
The Chinese killed some 75,000,000 people (mostly their own) in the 20th century.
Plus, why did you make this about the US? Have you forgotten that other democracies exist? I was talking about the human rights track records of democracies in general versus authoritarian governments in general. Democracies consistently have better records. You're the one who decided to cherry pick one of the worse democracies (and still failed to demonstrate that it is as bad as one of the worst authoritarian states).
We were talking about democracy and citizen's education regarding how their own country's political systems.
You're the one who is so obsessed and foaming at the mouth with any chance to bash China/USSR, you couldn't hesitate to derail a non-ideological conversation into boring ideological drivel.
Twitter, Instagram and TikTok would like to differ. User created content is still a major thing, even if we stopped calling it web 2.0. Most of that just happens in other domains than programming (though Roblox exists, so programming does happen too).
Similarly, Youtube or TikTok wants you to create the most funny, informative and creative videos possible. Not because they love creativity, but because it serves their interest.
But no, most creators are not doing anything creative. One way to see this is to notice there are movies made a 100 years ago that people will still watch today. There are books written half a millennium ago people read today. There are pieces of music written 100s of years ago people listen to today.
There’s almost nothing created on Instagram or TikTok that people will want to watch even a few days after it is created.
To be fair Twitter might have some posts of value but that’s because of the idea that almost certainly came independently of Twitter. Twitter is just the avenue by which it’s spread.
I think YouTube still does encourage the generation of quality new content to some extent that people may want to watch years and maybe even decades down the line. But that’s pretty much the only “creator” app that does that. And that’s probably a result of the fact that YT was created well before social media and mobile phones came around, so the content standard set on YouTube was fairly high quality. Newer “creator” apps encourage short throwaway content that can go viral. Not quality, creative content that can stand the rest of time.
Now that putting creative works out into the world is cheap and easy, yes, the vast majority of the dross will be forgotten almost immediately after it’s uploaded, but a few gems will remain the be passed around for decades or longer.
p.s. even more than 200 years old: https://youtu.be/qP-7GNoDJ5c
Smartphones don't encourage programming because programming is power, in so far as it facilitates the ability of the individual to bring about actions manifesting their plans and desires. Apple, Google, et al. want obedient, docile serfs who pay tribute unto Caesar, tempt more serfs into their domain, and maintain their aesthetic preferences and dominion.
The productive question is: What can be done about it? How can the user be liberated from subservience and helplessness, which they are taught to desire with such fervor by well-funded and highly sophisticated propaganda/PR machines?
Would rephrase as the desire to keep you dependent is a result of the control and cashflow they desire. But yeah, we called TV the idiot box for similar reasons.
For this to be true, logically the tools to create smartphone programs would be fiercely protected and only available to the chosen few and smartphone OS developers would never in a million years promote learning how to program on their devices.
From my end it looks like the opposite of all of that is happening.
I went to a school in "THE GOLDEN AGE" of 8-bit micros and I was the only one out of 1,100 who used the single room of Apple IIs to type in BASIC programs.
My daughters went to a school that has classes on programming, including Android development.
Turbo Pascal used to be so expensive I couldn't afford it.
Android studio is $0.00 and the (free) resources for development that apple and google openly distribute make many of my college classes look pathetic.
In a way, they are. They are gatekept in a way that is transparent to you because you find yourself on the correct side of the gate. Apple's gatekeeping is overt, while Google's is more covert:
1) They require a desktop computer - a powerful one at that. Apple requires a Mac. It would be trivial to release an app builder that ran on the phone, but they don't. Apple even outright forbids such apps, or any kind of interpreted environment. Apple also forbids installing things on stock iPhones without passing through Apple servers, and they require you to pay $99 and be over 18 for that privilege. This completely kneecaps the development of any kind of "demoscene".
2) They are ridiculously baroque. I mean awful. Look at this[0] Hello World - "the simplest Android app". Note the wall of perplexing XML, and complex directory tree. Note the phrase "You don't need to understand this code fully." This is not irreducible complexity, this is the result of an attitude that the only people who should be developing apps are professionals with a lot of experience and patience.
There is 0 room for casual exploration in the app ecosystem. Hell, I enjoy programming, I can knock up a fun demo in LOVE in under a minute, I carry a smartphone everywhere, and yet I've never written a smartphone app. Not once. It's too much of a pain. You wrote BASIC programs for fun in school? So did I, on my calculator, at a rate of maybe 1 a day. Show me the kid who writes smartphone apps like that.
[0] https://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/the-simplest-android-app...
But yeah, native GUI dev is a mess. I wrote webapps all the time when I was in school though. Programming on a phone is kinda a pain because of the small keyboard and lack of browser devtools but it's definitely doable.
Trying to answer to question but excluding resources on the Internet is like trying to program without the Internet. It's very much possible, but only for some bizarre purity test. Between Stack Overflow, Google, and even ChatGPT, never mind that documentation is all online these days (developer.apple.com; devdocs.io); it's hard to imagine programming without the Internet. Why then not include Cloud IDEs as part of the answer? What sort of purity test do they fail? Sure, they rely on resources not on the device, but to the broader question - "encourage you to learn programming", I'd say they very much qualify.
> setContent { Text("Hello world!") }
I was able to type that out on my phone with only a little bit of trouble.
Reworking jsfiddle's UX to be optimized for smartphones (aka remove the huge left div) is an easy win. I'd be surprised if there wasn't already something like that in the edtech space, where teaching kids to code is currently very popular.
2. In the 80s seeing your choice of text on a screen was something really new to most people. Teletext would not be universal until the end of the decade. Nothing in the house had even a text display. Calculators were numeric only. These days, everything has a display.
3. There were no polished programs to compete with. A lot of early games were very simple. There was no App Store or Steam. You could write a Tic Tac Toe game never having seen a commercial implementation. Even if it was bad, your friends would be impressed.
If you want inclusive coding, Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35373052 . The 40 characters wide Basic terminal was of its time.
It came with a full version of linux on it, with a hardware keyboard. Their marketing around it was that it was 'the hackers phone', and they started trying to build a community around it by launching competitions and advertising the best hacks and out of the box ideas which could be achieved on the phone.
I remember running aircrack-ng on it to crack wifi handshakes which could be captuered on the stock phone. Running nmap etc, war driving. It truly was incredible.
As expected though, it died in the water. There was such little uptake in the community that nokia stopped developing the Maemo OS it had made for it, and silently killed the brand. I sometimes like to imagine what could have been achieved if they had pressed on with that product line and the marketing which encouraged breaking the norm and creating something cool on your phone.
Retrospectively, I'd like to have one running a Linux system today (maybe PostmarketOS with SXMO?), but well...
I did try programming from scratch and even typed in some of the programs published in BYTE and whatnot. Nothing I ever came up with on my own ever seemed worth the effort and certainly wasn’t how I wanted to use my time. What a pain in the ass. Typing all that crap and debugging was never as interesting as using programs.
The vast majority of people have no interest in messing with programming. Most people have no internet in making anything. You can complain that it’s a symptom of consumer culture or whatever but I think it has always been the case that more people want to use a tool than make a tool. Even back in the 80s computers were bought to use programs primarily. Only a tiny minority were interested in programming and that will always be the case.
You couldn't expect to have most use-cases solved by the available code, so people were willing to code what they needed. 8-bit computer without BASIC was almost useless.
Software was also very crude back then - it was possible for some teen to write a commercially useful piece of code in a few weeks - that code could then help you sell your hardware to other people.
Nowadays we have millions of programmers worldwide writing for only a few possible platforms and the low hanging fruits are long picked. Writing successful software today usually takes millions of man-hours. So hobbyists aren't that important.
There are more teens programming than ever and creating more things.
The pie is bigger. There might have been thousands or ten thousands of kids programming before now it's millions.
Programs don't take millions of man hours. I can point to many useful one man open source projects. Selling business software is as hard as ever and it's hard to get buyin without connections. Teens are not making those connections neither were teens in the 80s or 90s.
Back than ever computer type was a different platform. Your c64 basic program couldn't run on an Mac. Things were much harder to package for others to use.
Programming has less benefits now for teens
Anyway, this is not an excuse for the state of operating systems today, which dissuade people towards programming. Yes, I even mean Unix-like operating systems. Why? Simply because the mental gap between ‘programs as we use them’ and ‘programs as we write them’ is so large on a modern OS. Consumers are stuck essentially playing in the sandpit and don’t really learn anything about computing while they use the computer. Unless of course they have some weird drive that helps them weather the pain of going against the tide and actually learning what’s going on in their computer.
There is very little you can learn from an application (such as Firefox, telegram etc.) because they offer zero introspection and are completely alien things compared to how they are conjured.
Think of the Apple II, there was very little gap between using the ‘OS’, making a program and using a program. They were nearly the same thing, or felt the same.
How would you interact with the computer? Enter some text. How did you make a program? Enter some text and save it. How did you run and interact with the program? …
Alan Kay talks about this a lot. If you imagine Smalltalk (now Squeak) as an OS, the gap between programming and using programs is tiny, so you learn by consuming and thus the leap to proficiency isn’t so big.
Another great counter-example is emacs. It offers introspection info everything and lets you modify a lot of its behaviour in a uniform way. I thing this is why people like it so much. You learn it as you use it and you’re encouraged to modify it. It’s a far cry from how most software is made today.
This is of course changing, as mobile phones gain more functions. However, for it to happen it needs a change in culture. Phones have been largely seen as consumption devices, and still, a lot of people aren't comfortable writing long pieces with them.
It also could be as simple as what priorities the executive class wants to give their devices. I could imagine an alternate world where Steve Wozniak still had influence at Apple and he could push their lineup towards more hackable.
In the nineties computers hot Excel and similar, which took over basic tasks and people built their databases for their hobby or business, there ledgers, ... on top of that.
Today there is special software for most of those things and computers are mass market products, made by companies which want the user's to consume media (via iTunes, or YouTube ads etc.) and approachable for everybody. The product managers fear that just seeing a glimpse of a programmable interface drives people away and reduces the media consumption.
In the 80s and 90s. One could still have a very high level understanding of every single part of the computer. From Hardware to Software. The whole stack.
We now have a whole generation of programmers who dont understand a thing about Hardware. Not even enthusiast level. Nor do they understand anything beyond their domain within Software.
The bar is also a lot higher, when basic graphics and UI luxury and command line is still acceptable. You could quickly make a script to do something you want.
And then there is a whole generation of I would argue needless complexity added on top of complexity. Take Web development for example. CGI or PHP used to be Simple. It wasn't easy, but it was simple. I dont know where to begin to describe in today's web dev.
Its tiny form factor and lack of keyboard input are forbidding.
Even a lower-end unit is a relatively sealed package. I can get a command prompt on my 'droid unit via termux, but it's not going to show much, or easily integrate with the OS, for security reasons.
The kicker is that, from a risk-management perspective, I don't want to jack around with my (non-cheap) 'droid unit and risk bricking or destabilizing it.
- The IDE and language must be preinstalled or available with a one-click installer.
- The programming language must be extremely simple and easy to learn. Almost no currently popular language satisfies this requirement. Even Python is too complicated, requires learning too many libraries.
- Easy input and output, ideally with a GUI, but at least console style.
- Simple way to run a program. Just click or type "run", for example.
- Integration into the target platform. If programs are started by clicking on an icon, the deployment must provide apps with icons, of course.
- Easy deployment, either by source code or by a single file that can be run everywhere with an interpreter.
In addition to this, for modern phones there would need to be an interpreter for running programs on desktops, too, and an online library of extension packages and programs.
Not many languages/implementations/IDEs for phones satisfy these criteria. There are not even many for desktop. How many IDE/language combos do you use that are easy to learn and allow one-click deployment to all major platforms?
The reality is the time for tinkering and stuff is over (for pc workloads, you can tinker all you like with hardware/agri/space/radio/nuclear open-source). Computers, whether they are on your lap or in your pocket, are being controlled by big corporations. You might say "But, Linux isn't controlled by a big corporation" and you'd be wrong. All these big tech companies want to wall you into their garden to shake you down anytime they want more capital.
The best way to get that 80s tinkering feeling again is to go get a Raspberry Pi or something and start building your own thing. Don't expect any of the consumer tech to ever cater to that kind of crowd again. They may pay homage to their roots but their bottom line depends on you forking over cash on their services and app stores.
Both Android and iOS are designed to be locked-down consumer goods owned by the manufacturer and only used by you; they're not tools that encourage you to learn and tweak. You need to look elsewhere for that.
ex: In many respects there is vastly more effort involved in making them general purpose computing devices. Why harm profits catering to people who want that when the crushingly vast majority don't want it, when they can't be trusted to use it (directly or indirectly) without messing something up (harming profit via support costs), and when they aren't able to prevent bad actors from misusing it and harming them (again harming profits)?
ex: Why do game developers skip story? Because 90% of the market doesn't care about it. Why do movie studios crank out films with garbage stories/plot? Because 90% of the market doesn't care about it. As long as people and therefore companies believe that generating revenue is the only thing that matters, this results.
There's places where it falls down (mtx gachas, where individuals tend to all be overvaluing gambling dopamine in the same systemic way), but like - teenagers want to talk to their friends, not learn to code and if they did they have a perfectly usable computer
Naturally I learned Java and android as soon as I could. I published my first app soon after.
Well it didn't work so well on all devices. It worked on all my test Devices so I was stuck and the app was removed from the store.
Years later I released a game. It was taken offline several times before I didn't care anymore. Half of the time I didn't know why, I just submitted a new build on the current SDK it got approved and a few weeks later taken offline.
The whole ecosystem sucks. You build really temporary apps that likely won't work on future phones without rebuilding several times for new SDKs. Java is not a language that encourages fun in coding and Android makes the Java experience just worse.
But it can be done to an extent. Grab a cheap external BT keyboard, a folding monitor stand, and Termux or a Scheme interpreter, or a BASIC interpreter (I haven't looked, but I assume they exist), and you're there.
I've done a lot of programming and writing on the phone that way.
I suspect that, even now, including an IDE as a default app with a language compiler or interpreter would be a waste of space for most users. They wouldn't use it, and they'd complain about it taking up valuable photo and music storage.
If kids could have just instantly downloaded any program they wanted, they wouldn't have been copying programs out of the back of magazines.
Personally, I came a little later, but I also learned stuff because I had to in order to do the things I wanted to do. After enough exposure I realized it was fun and interesting.
Nowadays you can go to a page like this ...
https://no-gravity.github.io/html_editor/
... edit the code and see the result in real time.
This is not to say, some people better then others, just every human have some strong sides from possible set, but very rare people strong at all.
For simplicity, there are three main classes - math, arts, psychology (as example, Betazoids in Star Trek are not totally fictitious, exists people who are so strong in sensing others, so it could appear, like they read your thoughts). This is good correlated with number of graduated in Germany - ~35% (I think ~10% math, ~10% art, ~10% psychology). Some people are physically strong.
Programming is mostly math.
So, early 80s computers, gives great tools into hands of math people, and this duet gives lot of fruits.
After computers penetration become much more than 10%, it become impossible for education system, to educate more math people, so for others computer becomes just entertainment.
I believe, with AI teachers, private highly-custom education will become more affordable, so larger percent of math-capable will appear, but I can't predict exact number, may it become twice bigger, the same with others (arts, psychology), so 70% will be with diploma.
The last thing companies want to happen with smart phones is what happened to PCs. People were able to upend many large commercial companies in the 80s and 90s due to the low bar of entry.
Just to name a few: DEC, CDC, Data General, Wang. IBM almost folded due to the PC. So Smart Phones were made closed to prevent the same revolution from repeating itself.
Now the market is so big, we have enough customers to justify a polished, easy to use, featureful app for every task.
And people want security, meaning we need lots and lots of boilerplate to deal with all the permissioned APIs, plus we want reliability, so we can't just let people peek and poke. If we let people do that the app store would fill up with apps that used it, and half of them would be unreliable, and stuff would suck.
In fact, if there was a prompt at all, hackers could trick people into typing evil commands like they do to Linux newbies. Then those of us with tech experience would have to deal with it.
Much better to offer equivalent capability in a way that doesn't have an easy to exploit hole on the human side.
Smartphones DO encourage programming. There's like a million apps. They don't need a basic prompt, they just need to be there and really capable and make people feel its worth learning to develop for them.
There are various sandboxed easy to use dev apps on Android for those who want to do old school 80s BASIC stuff. And it's a pretty cool thing, but it's best kept where it belongs, in an app, not conflicting with the primary use case of the phone.
I do wish Google would support Flutter a little better and make stuff easier so we didn't need buggy third party libs though.
Why aren't AAA games running on text based interactive fiction engines? Because for the target market, that's crap.
Most people do not want to learn programming. I know, it's a horrible thought, but it is what it is.
By the time smartphones shipped, communication with others and availability of vast repos of apps were almost unlimited. Only a tiny fraction of owners ever thought about coding up their own apps or exploring the infrastructure of the device.
And of course the makers of smartphone OSes had no intention of opening up their sealed gardens so users could compete with their near-total control of the user experience — a lesson that Microsoft's domination of the PC's OS taught to all budding monopolists.
But there are other reasons - these are the reasons that people who already like to program don't do so on their phones. Optimistically, improved interfaces (e.g. AI listening to your words and groking your system diagrams) will improve the programmability of phones perhaps even beyond the laptop.
The difference between Apple IIe and the iPhone 12 is scale. 40 years of Moore's law means the phone you hold in your hand has roughly 2^10 more components at 1/100 the volume. Early computers, you could look at them with your eyes, fix (and break) them with your hands. The same was true of the experience of using a computer - it was all very "close to the metal", with small, simple abstractions (like booting into BASIC, or restarting your computer with a new floppy in it - computers were essentially stateless).
It feels like a stroke of luck to have grown up alongside each iteration of PC technology because I can see how it would be overwhelming to try to understand it starting from 0.
Smartphones are consumer devices. And a Raspberry Pi 400 is probably even more niche than 80s computers were in comparison.
In any case I don't think it's about the devices at all, there are just better things to do even for an introvert who doesn't go out much. Just different times.
And the target audience doesn't want to be a programmer or even customize their phone.
The user in the classic desktop design was intended as a powerful tools in hes/shes hands, modern mobile+cloud are designed to milk data and keep people entertained.
A tablet device, on the other hand, is more likely to possess a higher-capacity battery and be usable for content generation / long-form editing.
And nothing stopping you from pushing your app to Google Play so all your friends can download it onto their phones.
Probably the major reason why early 80's computers made basic so prominent is that there wasn't much else to do with them.
They could have a USB port that takes a keyboard, because typing with your thumbs is simian. They could have a video-output port, because the screen is too damn small. They could have an easy-to-use filesystem ... but they don't.
So they're unsuited to purpose, on purpose I'm sure. They're not trying to get to thinkers. If I wanted to program away from a desktop, it'd be something on Linux, something tablet-sized, a USB port for a roll-up keyboard, an analog audio-jack. Maybe with a RasPi. No phone, radio, bluetooth, GPS or spyware, no fat cluster of worthless junkware. I can wait. Until then, a laptop. And if the code can't run on a phone, oh well. They had their chance.
The best part was that the author had included a lovely help manual which briefly showed how to use command line tools, gdb, tmux, vim, irc, git, etc. but it was cryptic enough that I had to experiment a lot. And the environment was pretty constrained - BusyBox, a couple of pre-compiled tools but no package manager or X11.
This was my gateway into "real" programming, as opposed to typing things in an IDE.
But there is nothing phone-specific about this, if I had an easy way to try Linux on my computer, I would have preferred that. Obviously now WSL exists so it kind of fills that niche.
I think the app is no longer available and there are better alternatives, but I still have it on an 8 year old device.
Negative:
1. Highly abstract, hiding away internal functionality. 99% of mobile is GUI. iOS even abstracts away the filesystem. Android is more transparent.
2. Highly locked down: walled gardens increase the friction to run custom code. Terminal as an app that can be installed, but on unrooted devices it's almost useless compared to terminal on a desktop.
3. Ergonomics: smartphone keyboards and screens are not conducive for onboard development. Solutions exist but are pretty niche, and most people would prefer attaching a real keyboard.
Positive:
1. Arguably mobile platforms have increased the number of coders! The app stores facilitate distribution and payment, encouraging new programmers to make an impact. Desktops are in most cases the actual development platform though.
Computers used to be nerds. Now they're for grandmothers. They're now idiot-proof appliances for consumption.
The same reason google and apple try to chain you to the app store... money. If they let you easily write your own apps, then they lose out on all those app store "fees".
But, as others have mentioned in various posts, I think the answer to the question of BASIC REPLs has multiple angles.
First, most early 80s computers did not boot straight to a programming REPL either. As soon as you had some kind of disk operating system you ended up in a shell and would have to invoke a BASIC interpreter or other programming environment if you wanted it. As far as I can tell, the feature threshold was having enough storage to make multiple programs persistently available. That was true across CP/M, MS-DOS, and Apple computers. Then, when they added GUIs, the shell became some kind of GUI menu instead of a CLI. With more storage, you get more built-in apps and less emphasis on a "blank machine" ready to take custom code.
After decades of this growth of storage, a smartphone is really not marketed as a general purpose compute platform. It still has more than vestigial "communications appliance" characteristics and is morphing into "cloud appliance". There is a feedback loop where vendors are marketing an integrated experience that sets the expectation for the next round of products too. And at the mass market volumes they are reaching, economies of scale mean that this approach is targeted towards the largest consumer markets.
It's almost fractal, but the cloud applications themselves are going through the same kind of shift. The commercial pressures are to create ever more integrated experiences for the mass-market user. It is a niche interest to want a general purpose platform where lots of capabilities are available, but the integrated whole is absent and waiting for a new custom program to be entered. Most consumers don't want the device or app that lacks this complete solution, and vendors don't want to provide all the infrastructure and then have some other party come in and claim all the value-add experience that is most visible to the paying customers.
If your system booted to the DOS, which many which had one available did not; to boot the Apple II DOS when it was released, you had to use the BASIC REPL, and even once it booted it didn’t have its own REPL, it hooked into the BASIC interpreter and provided BASIC commands for interacting with the disk, making the BASIC REPL its REPL and the BASIC interpreter its batch programming environment. While the exact details may be different, having the DOS be an under-layer which didn’t have its own shell was common on other systems, too.
We need something that utilizes touch screens to implement logic.
Something like Scratch but that would let you import libraries. Although I don’t think that’s imaginative enough to surpass traditional keyboard programming.
The problem with visual languages thus far is that they don’t really accomplish anything beyond text languages. I find them to be more difficult to understand than say python or JS.
The future of business logic app programming is going to be describing the details and having some AI implement it.
Meanwhile in the 80s, you had to know some command line just to run a game. If you wanted free games, you had to hand copy the code from a book. Once you learned a little bit, you were either content and kept playing the games or you wanted to learn more about how the game and the computer works.
We don't have that same barrier to entry now. That's good and bad, but that's part of why computers and smartphones are so ubiquitous now.
The smartphone is descended from simple communication devices, and adapted into a richer communication environment and a content consumption device.
You need a computer to do anything hacky with a smartphone, so you're more likely to get into the details on a computer in the first place. Smartphones are mostly useful for consumption of media, an activity that isn't really condusive to tinkering and modifying.
The closest modern equivalent to the early 70s/80s computers as something to learn programming on are things like the Arduino.
Smartphones just don't compare - they are inherently complex, not fully open/documented anyways, and tooling doesn't help. Can't even develop for an iPhone without owning a Mac too.
Cellphones are consumed by the vast majority of people as expensive toys and nothing else.
The non profit hosts a race where the participants build their own cars. My app helps track the race cars. We use GPS, 3g, wifi, a touch screen, and a 12 hr battery to: track cars and send their location live to our website. This simply wasn't possible before tablets - amd it is really cheap with a cheap tablet.
That's a UNIX-ish shell environment.
I wish there was a way to use Android APIs from a scripting environment in Android phone. I tried a bit during last semester, but didn't get anywhere due to lack of time. What I wrote was a beanshell environment which lets you evaluate statements like REPL. But since Android and Java bytecode is different, it can't even pass lambdas properly.
I started with the BASIC prompt in 1981. And I still feel some nostalgia for those times. I don't write "software" per se, but use programming as a problem solving tool. On the PC, when I'm creating stuff rather than consuming, I typically live inside a Jupyter notebook.
I need a keyboard and a screen. We haven't come up with a better coding interface.
The industry wants you to get everything you want through one click, nowadays though, it's not even a click, you just need to talk about it and Alexa and Google Home will pick up on it.
Your specific claim isn’t worth responding to, but maybe you’d enjoy a short history of “kids these days are spoiled” - https://twitter.com/paulisci/status/1600628195854020608?s=20
Yes, computers at that time stsrted with a Basic prompt... because there was no appstore, and (at the start) very little in terms of apps. You were supposed to program it yourself (even by tediously copying listings from magazines) and, especially for the early generation products, storage was either very finicky (cassette tapes) or quite expensive (floppy).
In the same years, consoles also started to become a real product, like Atari 2600, Colecovision etc.
Guess what? Consoles did not start up with Basic or Assembly... because you were supposed to use cartridges to play something that had been programmed by a guy working for a company.
So I would argue that personal computers were built and sold (at least at the very start) for people who had a background in electronics and/or an interest in programming. Visicalc changed this almost overnight because after that computers became "interesting" for small business... and this in turn created a market for word processors, small inventory management systems and so on. But also a big push to make "serious" computers (CP/M) that could fit the format/size/price of Apple and TSR-80.
What I am trying to argue here is that PC were at the start mostly intended as educational devices, because there was very little in terms of shrinkwrapped sw to sustain other business cases. And if you just wanted something for your children to play with, you would buy an Atari at a fraction of the price of a Commodore PET or Apple.
Smartphones were always sold as "communication device first" and also the business infrastructure to almost immediately create a large portfolio of apps was already in place (if you remember the original idea for iPhones was not to develop for iOS but just create webapps).
TL;DR: If you bought an Apple at the end of the 70s you absolutely needed a Basic interpreter or it would have been just a very expensive paperweight. If you bought an iPhone in 2007 you wouldn't need to write your own software to get any use out of it.
Also imagine how much better the world would be if you turned on a smartphone and all you got was a BASIC prompt and had to program the rest of the system yourself.
If you wanna make youtube videos, I’d take an iPhone over a BASIC prompt any day.
actually, cobol was supposed to be easy for buisness people to create applications in a "natural language". so, considerably before the 80s, though there were other developments aimed at doing so then, all of which failed miserably.
LLMs will change a lot of this though.
I mean, even with large language models, isn’t there a whole new area forming around “prompt engineering“?
Natural language is just very imprecise. It relies on shared context. It’s not even working, particularly well between humans if they don’t know each other well, as you can see in all forms of politics, and actually not even that well in many marriages. Often enough, in the end, you have to call in the specialists to figure out what was actually said, and what wasn’t… So that my bank account doesn’t rely on this technology, but on computer code and math, that’s not a step backwards, in my opinion, but a step forward.