[fragmede]

Because we want to. Of course the political capital of bunch of nerds isn't enough to make it happen but while the reasoning is different, I can't buy a new car that I can register without seatbelts, so the concept of making things illegal to buy is not entirely foreign. Of course, those are for safety, but I also can't buy a car that won't do at least 55 for the freeway unless I want a golf cart, so suitability for purpose is another concept. We'd just have to define computer in a legal sense, and then categorize the iPad as a computer, and finally make it a requirement that you can run your own code on computers. Of course, carrots are better than sticks, so maybe put a tax on all non-computer electronics, and a rebate for computers. All just to be able to run my own code on an ipad. Which, you can actually do with Pythonista. There's a small ecosystem of apps using that, as well as the official Shortcuts app, which I'd call programming. it's not Xcode on an iPad (though I'm sure there's a lucky engineer at Apple that has one that can do that, but then doesn't get to have any fun with it), and it's not really close either.

[steve1977]

> Because we want to.

Who is "we"? Apparently not enough people want this.

> I can't buy a new car that I can register without seatbelts, so the concept of making things illegal to buy is not entirely foreign.

That's a strawman argument. Not having cars without seatbelts has safety implications. A better analogy would be cars which don't allow you to replace the built-in car stereo for example.

> so maybe put a tax on all non-computer electronics, and a rebate for computers. All just to be able to run my own code on an ipad. Which, you can actually do with Pythonista.

Then maybe we should also have a tax for computers that run Python, because it's so energy inefficient. Only make the ones tax-free that only allow C++ and assembly language.

[fragmede]

> Who is "we"

Everybody who wants Xcode on iPads to happen. If you do not want such a thing, I am not talking for you. There may be dozens of us and we don't have the political clout to make it happen, but maybe we can agree that something has been lost here.

Is it still a straw man argument when I explicitly point out that I know it's not the same thing, twice, with the phrases "while the reasoning is different" and "Of course, those are for safety"?

As far as taxing Python for energy inefficiency goes, If it means violating Wirth's Law, I can't say that I'd be entirely against it in the hypothetical because we both know that's never going to happen. It takes longer to open some apps on my iPhone that's a million times faster (though, to be fair, also does a million more things) than it took to open vi on a Linux box in console mode (no X) in the previous century.