Apple is in a bit of an odd place right now with respect to development and end-user programming. Ever since they released Swift Playgrounds they’ve seemingly decided to be much nicer to programming apps.
Pythonista is probably the most prominent such app, with deep integration with iOS features and full access to every API (thanks to ctypes you can even dlopen private APIs and use them...shhh). But there are some new ones too, like Play.js (full node.js environment), Scriptable, and probably dozens of others that I haven’t tried.
It’s a bit of an interesting time. The real question will be whether Apple continues the slow path towards openness or whether they choose to go back to locking things down. I suspect their push to make the iPad more “pro” will inevitably force them towards the former.
Pythonista is really very good, and it is easy to pip install pure Python libraries. Too bad Python is not one of my favorite languages. The Raskell app used to provide a decent Haskell environment in iOS, but, file access stopped working. Really too bad since it was fun to hack Haskell on airplanes, etc.
Swift Playgrounds on iOS are very interesting and makes me wonder if XCode might someday live in iOS, with appropriate code sandboxing.
Apple has made iOS and macOS app development much simpler with SwiftUI, simple enough that I enjoy using it. I think Apple will jump through hoops in the coming years to make app development easier.
Pythonista is probably the most prominent such app, with deep integration with iOS features and full access to every API (thanks to ctypes you can even dlopen private APIs and use them...shhh). But there are some new ones too, like Play.js (full node.js environment), Scriptable, and probably dozens of others that I haven’t tried.
It’s a bit of an interesting time. The real question will be whether Apple continues the slow path towards openness or whether they choose to go back to locking things down. I suspect their push to make the iPad more “pro” will inevitably force them towards the former.