So - some observations about pythonista:
First: There’s a lot of neat things in Pythonista that we should… be inspired by. 
and then move right on to copying in Codea. I’m not proud, and it’s CLEARLY been inspired by the ground Codea has broken.
a) when you’re in a program, tapping the title gives you a dropdown with shortcuts to all classes/functions in that module.
b) probably too late for this - but they have a full-on console mode, and if you don’t do the run loop explicitly ( you generally set up a scene, then run(scene) at the ‘end’ to start your event loop) you end up with old-school procedural code. I think this hangs up a lot of people. I made an abortive attempt (pre-font days) of writing a console class - it might be worth looking at again.
c) Their print() doesn’t seem to get hosed if you call it a bunch. We need to fix this. I use print for debugging a lot.
d) you can pick a font and size for the editor (so I can make it smaller, and see more on the screen, which is nice).
e) Their editor is scriptable (!) - so you can write code in python to extend it, and there’s a dropdown to execute that.
f) when you make a new project, they give you multiple templates - blank, scene, scene with layers. That’s kinda neat.
g) Their standard library is huge. This is more a Python thing than a pythonista thing, but I’m jealous. I know the original concept of Codea was a processing-type thing, but it’s more than that now - we should go thru the normal libraries that lua has, and include them if there’s not a good reason not to. Things they can do out of the box include get/set the clipboard(!), keychain access, bit manipulation, unicode, date/time manipulation, support for big decimal and rational numbers, full file/directory support, data marshalling/unmarshalling, deep copies, dbm support including SQLITE3, zlib and archive (zip/tar) support, parsing and emitting CSV and plist files, crypto services (not just https, but hmac and md5 and unix crypt), low level sockets and signals, MIME and JSON support, XML parsing, an embedded web browser (yes, not spawning out to safari - I suspect I can run javascript in it), HTTP Server support, POSIX support… the list goes on. I have wanted most of these at one point or another for Codea (I didn’t list the stuff I didn’t want), and most of them shouldn’t tweak apple too much. This is one place where pythonista lucked out - this is all part of the standard python libraries, so it was “free” for them, or nearly so.
h) it runs on the iphone. Seriously - my iphone has the same resolution as my old ipad; make an upcoming version universal, and let people deal with teensy fonts, or a 40 column screen. I did lots of good programming in a 40 column 24 line screen, back in the 8-bit days.
Finally, lest you think I’m smitten: Python REALLY CHAPS MY HIDE. Oh - it’s killing me. The mindset of python is so alien to my own… I feel like I’m writing COBOL. And - I’ve written COBOL. If Codea didn’t exist, I’d be happy enough with pythonista, but I know we can do what it can, without silly whitespace rules and syntax gotchas. (Hey - “i++” is valid in python - it just doesn’t do what 99% of the world expects it to do. I could go on - I have a laundry list. Ask me about whitespace sometime you have an hour or two to kill…)
The pythonista guy did a great job - and picked the wrong language.
