I suspect for that to ever have legs, it would require the redefinition of what programming *is* to be amenable to one-finger, drag-and-drop operations on a tablet. And, well, people have been trying to do that since there have been programming languages. The complexity you need to express to do anything real just isn't expressible that way - same as UML becomes useless as soon as you touch anything non-trivial, or worse, concurrency. I don't see that changing any time soon.
Every big company that does languages / tooling, at some point, has executives who aren't programmers, and think "Hey, programming should be done the new cool way on phones and tablets - and then we could hold people's software for ransom, make them dependent on our tooling and have to deploy on our cloud! Think of the $$!" And they throw a bunch of money at it and build something that sort of works and nobody wants or likes. Rinse and repeat. The big problem goes back to IBM's 1990s attempts with Visual Age, where your code isn't files on disk, it's in this magical database. That sounds great until the first time you want to use an external tool against it, only it's all kept in a locked vault by your IDE. Maybe it will work someday, but not with any of the current programming languages - it would need something designed from scratch for that purpose. And good luck making that not a tinker-toy. -Tim On Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 12:32 PM Kenneth Fogel <kfo...@dawsoncollege.qc.ca> wrote: > When I attended Microsoft Ignite, I was a guest of Microsoft, we were told > of a new version of Visual Studio that will be hosted in the cloud. You can > see it at https://online.visualstudio.com > <https://online.visualstudio.com/login>. You need a Microsoft account and > a free Azure account. You can see the details for yourself and the purpose > of this email is not to promote this offering. > > > > What this email is about is to discuss whether or not a cloud based > NetBeans is possible. With more and more users, therefore potential new > developers, using tablets and Chromebooks, less and less people will have > traditional PCs. Other languages such as Python have browser based IDEs. > Should we be investigating this? > > > > > > [image: cid:image011.jpg@01D58921.806E3550] > > *Ken Fogel* > Faculty / Java Champion > > email: kfo...@dawsoncollege.qc.ca > phone: (514) 931-8731 local 4799 > > Dawson College, 3040 Sherbrooke St. W Westmount, Quebec, H3Z 1A4, Canada > > [image: facebook icon] <https://www.facebook.com/ken.fogel> [image: > twitter icon] <https://twitter.com/omniprof> [image: youtube icon] > <https://www.youtube.com/kenfogel> [image: linkedin icon] > <https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenfogel/> [image: instagram icon] > <https://www.instagram.com/omniprof/> > > [image: cid:16cd4bdce7eaf8d708] <https://www.dawsoncollege.qc.ca/> > > > > > -- http://timboudreau.com
