http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=11121944


in reply to Re^2: [OT] A New Everything ?
in thread [OT] A New Everything ?

Has anyone here tried to use perl to script with the target being an ipad?

Same question with Fire HD 8 tablet from amazon?

"A mase of twisty little languages, all different" describes PCs much better than smartphones. Walled gardens making deployment difficult (e.g. Apple charging about 1/12th of what I earn as a Ph.D. student for the right to run own code on hardware bought from them1), sandboxes breaking assumptions hidden in the language (there is a filesystem, but not for you. Only vendor's spyware has access to most of it), new APIs and paradigms for user interaction that nobody bothered to wrap for your $language_of_choice mean that, typically, you get one or two languages that work best on a given platform (Java & Kotlin for Android, Swift & Objective-C for iOS), a few more that you may be able to get running at the cost of reduced user experience (ever tried to run a command-line application on a 5" smartphone with no keyboard?) and the rest of them forever inaccessible to you despite the platform being very much Turing-complete and being able to run the code. In theory.

1 With some very interesting clauses about what gets into the App Store. Last time I checked, all scripting languages were forbidden, but they probably relaxed that requirement since (otherwise there wouldn't be a JavaScript-capable browser).