[easrng]

I agree with most of this post, but "Apple requires a Mac. It would be trivial to release an app builder that ran on the phone, but they don't. Apple even outright forbids such apps, or any kind of interpreted environment." isn't actually correct. They have a first-party app called Swift Playgrounds that lets you write apps on iPads, and other interpreters are allowed (Pythonista, Scriptable, iSH)

But yeah, native GUI dev is a mess. I wrote webapps all the time when I was in school though. Programming on a phone is kinda a pain because of the small keyboard and lack of browser devtools but it's definitely doable.

[zamnos]

For some reason we all read the question and limited our answers to an on-device BASIC prompt like it's still the 80's. It's not the 80's though and we have the Internet and you mentioned webapps - why don't we count cloud IDEs as something that "encourages you to learn programming right away?" There was no requirement in the original question as worded that it be an on-phone development happen on the phone, and yet we all read it that way. On my phone, I open the web browser, enter a VScode web Github Codespace, and a print ("hello world") later I'm off to the programming races, running my code on server on the other end.

Trying to answer to question but excluding resources on the Internet is like trying to program without the Internet. It's very much possible, but only for some bizarre purity test. Between Stack Overflow, Google, and even ChatGPT, never mind that documentation is all online these days (developer.apple.com; devdocs.io); it's hard to imagine programming without the Internet. Why then not include Cloud IDEs as part of the answer? What sort of purity test do they fail? Sure, they rely on resources not on the device, but to the broader question - "encourage you to learn programming", I'd say they very much qualify.