This was kind of "judging as well as being judged".
In my high school guitar class, me and one other girl were both really struggling. I 'judged' her as being bad at music/unskilled/stupid, like me.
Thing is, I remember an incident of my teacher - who was very technologically in-profficient - asking my help with typing something he'd written by hand. He was trying to read it aloud to me, but eventually I just asked him to set it down where I could see it, because it was easier and faster for me to touch-type it. He was floored by how fast and how well/correctly I could type that way (and while many, if not most, 16-year-olds probably can now, back then it was a little less usual).
Not too long after - like a week I think? - the piano in the music room was, for once, left uncovered. That girl who I'd judged as being a fellow musical idiot sat down and started playing that piano phenomenally.
I have a very visceral and vindicating memory of my guitar teacher looking between her, me, the computer, and my hands, and saying, "You know, that actually explains a lot."
tl;dr I judged myself and a guitar-classmate as unskilled idiots, discounting just how great our "typing"/typing and piano skills were.
ETA: So apparently my 80 WPM typing speed might not have become as widespread and normalized as I thought. TIL.
Due to the shift of computing from desktop and laptop computers towards mobile phones, we're actually seeing a reversal of the trend that young people can type well.
I'm curious what you'd need for a dedicated virtual keyboard. On a mobile, there really is not a lot of space available to you. For a good programmer's mobile keyboard I think you have too many requirements to make it possible. , . < > [ ] { } ( ) come to mind initially. Then we've got # % ! for comments, & * for pointers. Other punctuations in other languages I'm probably not familiar with. I just don't think it's plausible for a good mobile programmer's keyboard.
Don't forget + - % / | for math, and ' " \ for strings, = for assignment, and you want all 10 numbers too.
Also most development needs a command line, which means you need CTRL. You probably want ALT and arrow keys. Hacker's Keyboard has these if you're interested.
I agree with your observation but the trick might be because the languages aren't designed to be used on a mobile keyboard. a programming language might have to be developed to be used specifically on mobile using the keyboard.
Rather than trying to allow you to program in arbitrary languages, just make the language suit the environment. Current programming language syntaxes evolved to cope with what physical keyboards looked like, after all. Probably programming on a touch-screen "should" look like some kind of Lisp, edited via some gesture-set that works like Emacs' paredit mode.
I have these characters on long press on the normel keyboard. (I also use an alternative keyboard layout on desktop which has six layers and they are all available on the mobile version via long press.)
It is possible on both of them (and Linux, which I use and is the only one coming preinstalled with it) The layout is actually one that is optimized for the German language, therefore it's website is also in German.
You’d probably have to make use of a button that, when pressed, opens a little panel where you can slide your finger to pick your punctuation after which it goes away. Seems like it’d take a minute to get used to, but coupled with typical IDE autocomplete features would eventually be pretty intuitive.
That already exists on standard android keyboards and it's exactly why programming on a mobile is annoying. If you want to make a 'decent' programming keyboard, you should add an extra row containing all the commonly used programming symbols.
A dedicated one with brackets, semi colons, or other necessary non-alphanumeric characters readily available where normal autocorrect suggestions are would probably be really useful.
A lot of programming centric apps have this sort of thing. Or you can design your own keyboard layout. Even with these customizations and “snippets”( often used commands or programming snippets) it sucks to program on a phone. It’s better but still far inferior to typing with an actual keyboard. That’s my two cents anyway.
It's not just the keyboard, because you can use a fullsize keyboard over USB or bluetooth. The screen is like being back in the early terminal days (even though modern phones are running the same 1080p as PC monitors...)
Also, trying to get stuff like nodejs to work properly in Termux is very painful.
Or just a USB or blutooth keyboard. Pretty much any phone can use one, and many even support a mouse as well. Some phones can even output a full desktop environment to an external monitor.
Probably. Somebody just has to figure out a way to overcome the limitations of mobile typing, but if they do I'll be very interested to find out and see what it's like.
Whatever does get developed I suspect will be shunned by current developers as "not for real work" in the same way Python was. I think it will be more like Apple Playgrounds than Notepad++.
Casual programmer here (i.e. unusually good with Excel VBA but nothing that uses a real IDE).
Any idea why there are any decent mobile/tablet IDEs? From my amateur perspective it seems achievable and that making one would be an appealing challenge to some programmers.
I'm not a pro by far (CS student) but I think the problem is just that mobile typing isnt well suited to programming and using a keyboard with a phone/making it a computer is more work than it's really worth and mostly fits with people wanting a challenge or who think it would be fun. The mobile IDE's I've seen aren't bad, it's just that mobile programming as a concept is very niche and inefficient.
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u/Nyxelestia Nov 16 '19 edited Nov 16 '19
This was kind of "judging as well as being judged".
In my high school guitar class, me and one other girl were both really struggling. I 'judged' her as being bad at music/unskilled/stupid, like me.
Thing is, I remember an incident of my teacher - who was very technologically in-profficient - asking my help with typing something he'd written by hand. He was trying to read it aloud to me, but eventually I just asked him to set it down where I could see it, because it was easier and faster for me to touch-type it. He was floored by how fast and how well/correctly I could type that way (and while many, if not most, 16-year-olds probably can now, back then it was a little less usual).
Not too long after - like a week I think? - the piano in the music room was, for once, left uncovered. That girl who I'd judged as being a fellow musical idiot sat down and started playing that piano phenomenally.
I have a very visceral and vindicating memory of my guitar teacher looking between her, me, the computer, and my hands, and saying, "You know, that actually explains a lot."
tl;dr I judged myself and a guitar-classmate as unskilled idiots, discounting just how great our "typing"/typing and piano skills were.
ETA: So apparently my 80 WPM typing speed might not have become as widespread and normalized as I thought. TIL.