Writing Code

I had a couple of links in drafts related to programming via phone:

Ask HN: What is a good phone for to write code on? Dated May 11, 2018. 

Top answer starts with  "None." and goes on at some length. Second highest answer says "I recommend getting a low-end laptop. No phones (or tablets) are good for writing code."

Ask HN: Why don't people program on their phone? Dated November 2, 2018.

Top complaint: The keyboard sucks. It does contain some potentially useful comments and that's likely why I kept it.

I'm significantly handicapped and dirt poor. I gave my son my laptop more than two years ago because circumstances changed and it was the expedient solution to a bunch of things going wrong and he was okay with that because he had the opportunity to see I barely used my laptop anymore. I mostly sat in front of my laptop doing stuff on my phone.

I recall needing my laptop to do certain things on Reddit. I no longer spend time on Reddit and screw these morons who both try desperately to force everyone to use the app, not the desktop or browser interface, and simultaneously provide wholly inadequate moderation tools in the app.

If you are going to go mobile first on your money-making project, the smart thing to do would be empowering your army of slave labor moderators to go mobile first. But, no, Reddit management isn't that bright.

Is it aggravating to "hunt and peck" with a single finger instead of typing properly with ten fingers like I learned to do in high school Typing class the year before they officially renamed it Keyboarding? Sure.

I'm seriously handicapped. I'm supposed to be long dead. If ANYTHING works at all in my life, that's a huge win for me.

I have had phones with less aggravating keyboards for writing HTML snippets where accessing buttons for less than, greater than and quotation marks took fewer clicks. I don't know how to intentionally arrange access to a better keyboard on whatever phone I happen to have. I changed phones again and returned to a less optimal keyboard.

So I'm absolutely certain you could design a keyboard for coding via phone that would improve the process. And you could probably do different keyboards for different languages because they all have different doohickeys that matter for open tag, close tag, etc.

The dates on those posts show my interest in learning to code on my phone goes back eight years. But I may never again use a laptop or PC, so it's probably phone or nothing at this point.

I will note that a previous post on this site talks about needing to do HTML bits for blogger on my laptop instead of my phone. I now routinely do that in my browser on my phone.

I can't say how much of that is "Tech advanced and made it more viable." And how much of that is "I figured it out and made it work because this is my only real option currently."