Programming on Smartphones

Question

With smartphones becoming evermore accessible, they&rsquo;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&rsquo;s been attempted in the past and has failed. You could easily argue it&rsquo;s nowhere near as productive. But maybe that&rsquo;s because we still see things from the view of text based programming languages.I&rsquo;ve used the Alice IDE and Lego Mindstorm as a kid. I don&rsquo;t know where touch based programming is now, but if I had to guess, it&rsquo;s still very text centric in its fundamental design.

braabe · Accepted Answer

I think it is really, really hard to get the scope of a no-code or low-code platform right. If your scope is too narrow, your users will hit a wall where they cannot implement the feature they want ("I like the default search-feature, but I want my results sorted by length, not by date - sadly there is no option for that...") and if your scope is too big or too customizable, you need to be a programmer to understand/use it and might as well use [Your-favorite-language]. Joel Spolsky's "Leaky abstractions" (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...) fit that problem nicely. And I have no solution to offer for that...My problem with smartphones in that context is that (at least for me) it is very difficult do efficiently interface with them. You have rather limited space to display information ("Code-Blocks", your Program-Flow, Debug-Info, Output) or to input information (only two thumbs/drag-and-drop instead of all my beloved keyboard shortcuts). So I agree: To make that viable, there has to be a rather big paradigm shift, either in the way we interface with our machines or in the way we write programs.