"Theres not enough real estate on a laptop for modern development." <- which direction should we go, should we be able to compute in any screen size? should we require specific environment? should the environment adapt to the available devices? is computing on a smartphone a goal?

I don’t necessarily think that we have to move programming to phones, but I do think it’s a purely artificial constraint that we can’t do it today. The latest phones and tablets are more than capable of running all the tools needed for development, it’s just the user experience that’s lacking. As many simpler, non-programming related use cases move to mobile, the desire to do even more on these devices will just grow. And that increases the pressure to deliver some way to develop such use cases directly on these devices. If in the future we’re just hooking our phones and tablets up to bigger screens and physical keyboards, so we can edit code in a text editor, that would make me very sad. There’s so much more we can do with the capabilities mobile devices bring that desktops and laptops can’t really step up to. Many developers seem to focus on what we can do on computers that we can’t do on mobile. I’m super interested in the opposite — what we can do on mobile that’s not possible or at least awkward on a computer.

Well, programming is happening all the time in all those little programmable synths you can buy on the Apple iTunes App Store, so even tiny screens (which actually have tremendous pixel counts) are being used successfully. And the iPad has amazing stuff in the music real. However, one thing i don't like about those tools is they are age discriminatory, because nobody much older than 35 is going to be able to read those tiny icons and controls. I think companies should be fined for making products that hamper older people. We are very sensitive in the USA to wheelchair access, but i daily lament the trend toward low contrast interfaces with faint shades of gray icons that are teeny. We need to make programming more inclusive, and make interfaces size adjustable. The ability to program on a small screen is only limited by our ingenuity, however, during debugging of a larger program, a big monitor is frankly a must.