Ask HN: Programming on Smartphones

With smartphones becoming evermore accessible, they’ve become more versatile as well. GPS, flashlight, camera, pedometer, I could spend all day listing things it has replaced.

What about coding, not typing into a text editor, touch screen environments so users can piece together procedures, library calls etc.

It’s been attempted in the past and has failed. You could easily argue it’s nowhere near as productive. But maybe that’s because we still see things from the view of text based programming languages.

I’ve used the Alice IDE and Lego Mindstorm as a kid. I don’t know where touch based programming is now, but if I had to guess, it’s still very text centric in its fundamental design.