TouchDevelop

» see touchdevelop.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Typing code on a phone is miserable. Every programmer who has tried to fix a production bug from a train knows the specific misery of hunting for a curly brace through three layers of keyboard. Microsoft Research looked at that problem in 2011 and decided the answer was not a better keyboard. It was to stop typing. TouchDevelop let you build a program by tapping: you selected from lists of what could legally come next, and the structure of the language was designed so those lists were always short enough to fit on a screen.

The project was established on 20 July 2011 inside the RiSE group, Research in Software Engineering, at Microsoft Research in Redmond. It shipped first as a Windows Phone 7 application, which is the single fact that explains most of what happened afterward. You wrote a script on the phone, ran it on the phone, and could publish it to the Windows Phone Store from the phone. The whole loop closed without a computer in it. The app passed 200,000 downloads with more than 20,000 people signed in, which for a research prototype attached to a third-place mobile platform is a genuinely good number.

A web version followed, which freed it from the platform it was born on, and by then the thing had found its real audience. Not commuting developers. Teenagers in classrooms, and the teachers who had to get thirty of them writing something that ran by the end of a lesson.

~ the case file ~

~ the classroom years ~

Education is where TouchDevelop stopped being a curiosity. It ran in browsers, needed no install and no toolchain, and its structure made syntax errors close to impossible, which removes the single largest source of misery in teaching a first programming language. Microsoft pushed it through its own education programs and it turned up in school computing curricula, particularly in the UK. Then the BBC micro:bit happened in 2015, and TouchDevelop was one of the editors children used to program it. A million of those boards went to eleven-year-olds in British schools. For a stretch there, a research project designed so you could code on a bus was the front door to physical computing for an entire year group of a country.

~ the next chapter ~

Microsoft replaced it deliberately rather than abandoning it, which is rarer than it should be. MakeCode was built to cover the same ground with blocks and a JavaScript view and hardware simulators, and Microsoft's stated reasoning was that it wanted a platform that reached physical devices like the micro:bit and environments like Minecraft rather than one shaped around a phone that no longer existed. TouchDevelop was retired in June 2019. The FAQ explaining it still lives on makecode.com, and the source is on GitHub under the PXT project, so the ideas were carried across even though the editor was not.

My distance from this one is not geographic. I am a computer engineer and this is squarely my category, but the entry point was a Windows Phone, and I never owned one; by 2011 I was on Android like nearly everyone in Turkey, and the web version arrived after the moment when I would have poked at it out of curiosity. There is a whole class of Microsoft software from those years that was interesting and good and reachable only through a handset almost nobody bought.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »