> real work is typically file-centric

What is this silly ‘real work’ gate-keeping? I guess the author means their work.

My fitness instructor uses an iPad to refer to fitness plans. He’s doing real work. He uses files to do it as well! Opening an Excel spreadsheet.

My friend is an outdoor teacher and uses an iPad as a map. He’s doing real work. Maps are files.

Another friend works as a train engineer and uses an iPad to refer to technical manuals. He’s doing real work. The manuals are PDF files.

My colleagues who do recruitment at conferences take people’s details on iPads. They’re doing real work too. Each form filled in is a file.

The "i-devices are just consumption devices and toys LOL" viewpoint, which is shockingly still common in programmer circles, seems to rely on a bizarrely narrow idea of what "doing real work with a computer" looks like. Meanwhile iPads and in some cases even iPhones are wildly better devices for lots of work, creative and otherwise, than a "real" computer.

That viewpoint is common in programmer circles because it applies most strongly to them. The work they've been doing for likely their entire career is still either painfully difficult or impossible to do on anything other than a "real" computer, so of course they're going to say that for them an iPad is a terrible replacement for one.

Actually most developers would stay in two apps. Browser and IDE.

Probably the use case that is best suited to an iPad.

You can't even compile and run code on a (mobile) Apple device. It's explicitly against the app store terms and conditions to allow users to do that.

> You can't even compile and run code on a (mobile) Apple device. It's explicitly against the app store terms and conditions to allow users to do that.

You better inform Apple then, that the Python IDEs that are available in the App Store need to be banned!

Last time I checked, the exact rules were that all of the code had to be either typed in by the user or included by the app. So there's no real way to share code or collaborate other copy pasting into text windows.

I haven't used Pythonista myself, and it is true that, as I understand it, Pythonista doesn't directly provide the capability to use "pip" or pull code from GitHub. But it seems that these issues have been addressed via plugins for Pythonista. E.g.,

https://github.com/ywangd/stash