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Ask HN: Programming on Mobile Phone.

15 points by rick_2047 ↗ HN
I just bought the Samsung Corby touchscreen phone. While playing games on it, it just struck me that if we can edit texts files and view pdfs on a mobile why cant we program on it?Ok not like actual major programming work, but lite tests for the time u have a brain wave and just need to test it. I searched for it and found some non mainstream scripting languages like hecl[1], mathpro [2] and mobilebasic [3].

I was wondering if anyone knows implementation of a mainstream(er) language. I think something like lisp would be good also as jRuby can be run on JVM cant a java enabled mobile act as JVM?

[1]http://www.hecl.org/ [2]http://www.mobile-sciences.com/ [3]http://www.mobilebasic.com/

15 comments

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davidw
I wrote Hecl, and think you should give it another look:-)

The problem is that 'mainstream' languages are awfully big. The initial versions of Hecl ran on my Nokia 3100, which had a limit of 64K for applications. Also, most mainstream languages that run on top of Java run on 'regular' Java, not Java ME, which lacks things like reflection. This means that porting them to Java ME is not trivial. Android might be a better bet, but it's still tricky, and it's still an environment where you don't want to be wasteful with space.

rick_2047
Hey I didn't dismiss your lang, actually its the best bet for a java phone. I just discovered it so will take some time.Why I am asking for more mainstream languages is because I would like to try things in a language in which I would implement the algo.
davidw
> I would like to try things in a language in which I would implement the algo.

Err... I'm not quite parsing this. It's very easy to try things in Hecl, you can even write mobile applications on line, entirely in a browser:

http://www.heclbuilder.com

pavlov
The Nokia N900 smartphone is currently the mobile programmer's paradise. Underneath its Maemo OS veneer is a fairly standard Linux. A terminal is part of the standard install, and there's no jailbreaking needed to install whatever you want.

There are packages for Python, Perl, GCC... And of course you can run pretty much anything by building it from source. The ARM A8 Cortex CPU is fast enough that it actually makes sense to do this.

If you want a more desktop-like programming environment, it's even possible to install Debian on the N900.

alexandros
I find the Android Scripting Environment to be quite cool: http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/

And it offers quite a few languages to play with, including Python, JRuby and Javascript (via Rhino).

Now if it would only have a better development environment...

rick_2047
As I told you I have a java based phone and I don't think I can jailbreak corby to install Android on it.
lucasoman
Thanks for this! Just installed on my Droid.
nuclear_eclipse
The T-Mobile G1 has an excellent, 5 row hardware keyboard, and I made use of it on many occasions to SSH into my server and make some modifications to code that I had ideas for, but didn't want to wait to get home to work on. Because the keyboard actually had multiple alt/shift and hardware keys, ConnectBot could remap them as tab, control and escape keys, so I could actually use Vim without any problems. Can you say that about your phone? :P
csomar
Okay, testing, trying... something just to spend time and learn instead of playing games. But I doubt you can do any work on it (if you have a project with databases and that needs lot of programs to execute).

As long as it's for fun then it can be!

gsiener
I believe this is one of PG's requests for YC applications.
profquail
Well, if you want a challenge, there's Pocket APL, which offers a complete IDE for APL on Windows Mobile:

http://handheld.softpedia.com/get/Desktop-and-Shell/Developm...

Daemmerung
APL would seem to offer a solution to the challenges of programming on a 240-pel-wide device. Unfortunately, WinMo doesn't offer any way of extending its HR. So Pocket APL users must enter APL characters by hunt and peck on a soft on-screen input panel.

I personally find this heartbreaking.

rick_2047
all these options you people give are good but work on either s60 or windows mobile, anything for java?
moconnor
You can run python on windows mobile; I even found some kind of IDLE version for it - there's a bunch of links here: http://www.awaretek.com/pymo.html#win I thought it was pretty good, but typing symbols was a pain. I wrote some twitter data mining stuff with it while waiting for a plane with it once.

If you want to do anything else with your phone, you don't really want a windows mobile, though :-(