Using Swift Playgrounds, Pythonista, Continuous and similar apps is not much different than booting up my Timex 2068 and coding away in the realm of Timex Basic.
The first is that those old systems were so limited you could either write BASIC or machine code. There were no distractions, no other apps, and no social media - except paper magazines. So 100% of your computer time was devoted to typing in code, learning about code, or writing your own code.
The other reason is that in the UK at least, a lot of one-man-shops produced an entire games industry around the Sinclair (Timex) Z81, Spectrum, and other 8-bits of the day.
The business had all of the magic characteristics of an open market: minimal cost of entry, minimal cost of marketing (through cheap ads in paper magazines), low-cost distribution, and an enthusiastic and largely untapped potential customer base.
No platform today has those characteristics. Web "apps" probably come closest, which is why we're talking about this on HN. But a lot of 8-bit businesses and careers were started without the corporate and financial cruft that surrounds modern start-ups.
The large majority of those UK professional shops were using 16 bit machines for coding those 8 bit games, while deploying them over connection cables.
Coding on the machines themselves was more of an indie kind of thing.
Plenty of stories about it on the Retro Gaming Magazine.
Most of my friends back on the 8 bit days never learned to code anything beyond LOAD "", as they had plenty of games to choose from at the local bootleg shop.
