And: “It’s easier to program a TI-89 calculator than an iPhone.”

> The original comment as it stands is fine. Don't expect to be able to interpret it on different terms than the way it was meant to be understood.

The comment is complete bullshit in this context.

> instead of what it was, which is a statement about HCI and the "implicit step zero" of software creation on today's commodity computing devices.

This is simply not true. The comment was a response to a thread. You have made up a context in which it makes sense out of whole cloth.

You can see the comment wasn’t meant in this narrow context because the poster defended it by saying ‘superior in what way?’, rather than by clarifying the context in which it might be valid.

I miss the days when there was an instant on programmable device. We need that again. It would be great if iPhones shipped with Swift playgrounds as a pre-installed app for example.

Swift playgrounds shipping on iPhone sounds a lot like the “I wish there was something akin to TI-Basic for smartphones. A built-in IDE with an interpreted language, with easy path to compilation.”

So does Pythonista.

But a ti-84 is not easier to program than an iPhone, except for in the trivial sense that you can skip a few taps needed to install a programming app. Other than that, the ti is strictly worse.

I agree calculators are a good way to learn a limited form of programming, however Apps definitely better. If you want to quibble over the ease of installing an app vs purchasing a calculator, that’s a sideshow to the value of learning python vs ti-84 programming.

The irony is that the biggest obstacle to the iPhone being easy to program is people saying it’s hard to program rather than saying ‘use Pythonista’ or the like.