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Comment by boberoni | Hacker News Reader

I read on another comment by a high school teacher that many of their students write essays on mobile. It seems that the younger generations are mobile-digital native, as opposed to desktop-digital native.

I don't expect desktop apps to be completely replaced by mobile apps, but the migration of some specific use cases is interesting to watch:

- Maps and navigation

- Email / instant messaging

- Photo editing

- Video editing

- Online shopping

- Banking and accounting

- and now, coding

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High school student here. idk if coding on mobile will take off in its current form. The tooling works, but it doesn't work well. I can (and have) writen things in the editor on Glitch[1] or in Termux on my phone, but the reduced typing speed for code (you can't rely on autocorrect like with normal text) and the lack of a proper web inspector (I use eruda[2] which is fine but missing features compared to the devtools on desktop browsers) make it frustrating to do larger projects.

[1]: https://glitch.com

[2]: https://eruda.liriliri.io/

Is it because they are "mobile-digital native" or is it because what they are being asked to write is closer to texting than a normal high school level English paper? I've seen what community college teachers are having kids submit for papers. While they do definitely look like they could have been written on a phone, it isn't because they have some type of skill in writing on mobile.

Most of the paper-writing-on-phones that I've seen is just a convenience thing. Google Docs/other cloud writing platforms make your documents available everywhere, and it turns out that there's a lot of down time where you can cram in some writing time if you're able to easily just pull it up on your phone. I remember writing papers on my phone in high school while on/waiting waiting for the bus. If you live near a college campus, you'll see a lot of students watching lectures, doing flash cards, and writing papers on public transit if you look close enough :)

I think the idea of the quality of text written being related to the screen size of the device on which it was input is an old person anachronism.

This would be like saying novel quality written in a word processor would be inferior to typing on a typewriter, or handwritten.

I write and edit almost all my HN comments on a phone, and I think they’re identical in quality and tone to what I’d write on a computer.

I recently read that many young people only use email for some professional communication

And its chat for everything else, including professional things, which also matches my experience lately I just didn't think about it

So then I started messaging young recruiters over chat apps and they are much more receptive than following up over linkedin/email

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