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Comment by jere | Hacker News Reader

I too wrote my first code on a TI-81. Though I had been making games for a while with various tools (e.g. TGF), it was nice to finally close the loop and write in a programming language, even if it was only BASIC. That pushed me to take a programming course in high school the following year. I was writing pong and asteroid clones and ray casting engines in class.

The author's points about the iPad seem pretty accurate. I can't even imagine how I would go from having an iPad as a high school student to stumbling into programming.

I haven't developed in iOS, but I did play around with Android and the thing that really frustrated me was that the sample games were several files and ~1,000 LOC. We're talking really simple games and the amount of boilerplate crap was mind boggling. To even get to that point, of course, you have to screw around with an IDE, plugins, an emulator, etc.

It's a far cry from PRINT "HELLO WORLD"

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> The author's points about the iPad seem pretty accurate. I can't even imagine how I would go from having an iPad as a high school student to stumbling into programming.

Funny, I thought the exact opposite; I agreed on the general point, but found the arguments against iPad bit weak. First of all they were factually incorrect. As others have demonstrated there are plenty of apps that allow programming the iPad in a way that is at least comparable to TIBASIC. You don't need developer accounts or review processes to use those apps.

More importantly the author missed the part that iPad is essentially just a platform, a tabula rasa if I may say so. As it does not provide any educational features on its own (afaik) some apps need to be provided by the school. And those apps provide the discoverability aspect that is missing from a vanilla iPad. It is reasonable to think that school would provide/require an app (or a collection of apps) that would be an equal or surpass the features of a graphing calc, including the programming features.

Of course I'm not really sure what educational apps are currently available, if they are adequate. But if not, then that would actually be something that HNers could do something about.

The difference with TI's calculator was there was a social motivation/aspect to programming them. Everyone had them and it was very easy to get started.There are programming environments for the iPad but it is a lot harder to share programs as not everyone has one and even if they do they need another level of indirection to get the program. The calculator is also much more prevalent/easy to use in the classroom.

My first program was a quadratic equation solver that everyone at my school used. I remember a couple people tried to imitate and improve on my program but I crushed them with new features and a better interface. I don't think I could do that with the iPad.

The technology is also a lot more complex and daunting with the iPad. You have the paradox of choice in choosing how you want to program it. You can't easily share programs with others and TIBasic, just due to its simplicity and the lack of design knowledge and effort for the user interface is a lot easier for a kid to pick up and start using.

One thing that isn't mentioned in the article is that if you wanted direct control over the screen you had to program in assembly; I don't even think they had programming language support for it at the time. It made it a lot harder to use than the regular TiBasic.

You also needed a special cable to upload software written in assembly onto the calculator. I started teaching myself Z80 assembly in order to program the TI-85, but I never got the cable, so I never got to try it.

>As others have demonstrated there are plenty of apps that allow programming the iPad in a way that is at least comparable to TIBASIC.

Although the power to program exists on the iPad, the chance of "just stumbling into it" is very low. The magic of programming on the TI was that although the device had some value with no custom programs, someone with no programming experience could greatly increase the capabilities of the device with a little bit of code. Everyone at some point made the basic quadratic equation program. Some people would make more complicated programs and maybe even start to write games. Programs were also extremely easy to run on the calculators.

The critical difference between the iPad and the TI-83 when it comes to programming is how much utility you get out of your first hour programming the device.

> Although the power to program exists on the iPad, the chance of "just stumbling into it" is very low

That would depend highly on what software is provided/required on the iPad by the school.

> I can't even imagine how I would go from having an iPad as a high school student to stumbling into programming.

I'm not so sure. I remember programming in high school. I wrote one or two programs for my TI calculator but mostly stayed away from it because the experience was so bad, and I wasn't that sad when it was lost/stolen (I preferred the HP anyway).

On the other hand, you could do a lot on a computer, share source code on floppy disks, use a nice debugger, use a nice language like C or Pascal. It took a bunch of code to set up a window and a proper event loop but you could type that in from a book or (later) a web page. It's been getting easier every year.

Graphing calculators are little more than terrible computers these days. Given how irrelevant they are now, imagine how irrelevant they will be when today's high school students finish their MSEEs and enter the workforce.

I'm not really commenting on the viability of iPads here, just on the (non-)viability of graphing calculators.

I can't even imagine how I would go from having an iPad as a high school student to stumbling into programming.

Soulver, Pythonista, Pixie Scheme, Scheme Programming Language, Lisping.

That's right, it must be possible to install an app that enables to program from the iPad (I don't owe one, so I may be wrong on that), but unlike the calculator, the programming environment is not included with the device, so many students who were not exposed to programming before will not even think of installing it on the iPad.

If you don't want to install something new, there's a pre-installed app called Safari which has a full programming language rather fast runtime and extensive display capabilities.

Its also a program that people use everyday, where they don't even think of programming anything for it.

I kind of figured the tools were out there and selected the word stumbling carefully. Even so, those look pretty awesome.

I wrote my first code on a TI as well.

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