I just remembered one time my "smartphone" actually empowered me.
When we were house shopping several years ago I got annoyed at having to do various calculations for monthly debt load, mortgage principal, etc.
At the time I was deep into Ruby programming and I was able to run Ruby on my phone and had written several functions to do several of these calculations for me.
So when we saw a house, I'd plug in values from the realtor sheet and get the info I wanted.
I remember a buddy of mine who bought whole-hog into the Apple ecosystem say: "You can run Ruby on your phone? You just made me hate mine."
@mdhughes it was a different time back in ~'12. :-)
@groovestomp 2012: https://web.archive.org/web/20121001003215/omz-software.com/pythonista/docs/ios/new.html
Before that, back to 2008-ish, I had TinyScheme compiled into my personal "Ki" app; couldn't distribute it, but it worked for writing a little code, hit Save, Run, get errors or results.
@mdhughes ah, neato. I know Apple used to have a no dynamic compilation policy. My buddy was also big into Ruby, so perhaps there was no similar Ruby option?
@groovestomp It's not a policy so much as technical limitations on the early devices which had 128K RAM free, if that. TinyScheme is a static compile, and uses as little RAM as you want to set. There were multiple BASIC interpreters early on, then for a long time they died out, and now several are back.
I presume Ruby only compiles as dynamic libraries, and in any case couldn't have run on anything until maybe 2012, because it's a bloated piggy.
@mdhughes indeed. I prefer not to use Ruby these days.
@groovestomp "Oh Ruby! Don't take my phone to town!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1e9p6J89rQ
@groovestomp (This cover version was very popular in Norway, back in the 1980-ies)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n_fKMi8FVo
@steinarb Jeg liker det!
Not such a big fan of the popular cover you linked. :-P
@groovestomp There's Ruby apps for iOS, as well as BASIC, Scheme (but old & limited version), JS, some others, but Pythonista is the gold standard of coding on your iPhone. Nice dev env/REPL and system libraries.