Response to ja re: smartphones

SDF user ja wrote a response[1] to my recent musings[2] on dumb- vs

smart-phones which I completely missed at the time. Sorry about that,

ja! I must confess to having fallen behind with keeping track of some

of the newer SDF phlogs.

It was definitely a huge eye-opener for me to read critical thinking

about smartphones from someone younger than me. Ja fondly remembers

writing Python programs on his smartphone under his desk during boring

high-school classes, and acredits this experience with his current

interest in aptitude in programming. After I had shaken off my

initial shock that anybody could actually write code on a smartphone

touchscreen (I find just writing short English text on a smartphone

tedious, and trying to use a terminal program to interact with a unix

shell absolutely infuriating), I recognised that this sentiment was

quite reminiscent of how many older folks feel about their C64, ZX81

or Apple II. I had always figured that the fact that more and more

people were getting their first exposure to computing on phones or

tables meant the looming death of this kind of early discovery of

technical computing, because everything about the devices seemed, to

me, to actively discourage this kind of thing. Maybe I'm wrong on

that front - I'd be very happy if I were.

I'm still not sure I've adjusted to the idea of high-school students

having their smartphones on them during class. I didn't get my

first mobile phone until my first or second year of undergraduate

studies, and didn't get a smartphone (which I probably did a year or

two after many other people) until just before I finished my PhD. I

also didn't make much use of laptops until about the same time, so I

had very definite and quite regular "offline" time in my life, even

if I was online a lot. Knowing what I do now about how well I can

think and work productively on a computer, and thinking back to how

much more focussed and dilligent I remember myself being as a

student, I kind of feel like I may have dodged a bullet...

[1] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/ja/phlog/2018/04/15-phones

[2] gopher://circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/dumbphone-dilemma.txt