Rui Carmo
I haven’t used Editorial in a while (although I initially wrote a bunch of workflows to aid my writing, I eventually decided to go back to non-scriptable editors), but I am very worried about Pythonista’s future, for two reasons:
The first is that my eldest kid pretty much lives inside it and has coded various apps, many using the bindings to UIView and the like.
He’s even ported bits of Tk across to do UI layouts, and it would be terrible to lose the one programming environment he really likes (Codea is nice too, but there is nothing else that even comes astronomically close in terms of “native”-ish Python development).
The second is that Pythonista is utterly unique in so many regards. It is an unstated masterpiece, and (at least in my view) pushed the envelope of what it is actually possible to do on an iPad beyond anything anyone else (even Apple) has done, so I really it needs to be future-proofed somehow.
I don’t think open sourcing it would be enough - there would have to be a team willing to keep it going, and even though I’d certainly roll up my sleeves and contribute (there are a few libraries I’d like to port over, for instance), Ole Zorn would still have to find a way to get actual income from it.
Apple, in particular, should take note. Swift Playgrounds were cute to begin with, but none of my kids used them after the first couple of weeks because they are too limited to do anything remotely useful, and this pushes forward the notion that the platform itself is, if not borderline hostile to developers, at least fundamentally unsuited for programming in general, even at the most basic levels.