Languages, Operating Systems, video cassette formats - not successful on merits but on marketing, FUD, and corporate edicts. Microsoft declared C++ to be the lingua franca of Windows, and so it was. Java became 'accepted' after a critical mass of high-profile companies adopted it for use (IBM, Oracle, et al). Objective-C, in this developer's experience, is a very nice O-O language. It keeps the flavor of the Smalltalk origins while adding the efficacy of coding in C (when you need/want to). It is clean and simple - something I personally believe are the hallmarks of a great programming tool. But while Apple will keep alive the community of Obj-C coders, I don't think anyone need fear that we will all be coding in Objective-C in order to make a living. And in reference to the earlier post, there are many good languages out there, ancient and forgotten as well as new and struggling, that did/do deserve attention. They have, or will, "fail" not based on their strengths or weaknesses, but on whether someone will pay you to write in that language. I never cease to be amazed that Forth continues to have a strong and zealous user base, despite never finding widespread adoption as a 'mainstream' language. It is amazing and wonderful that people create, use, and support languages that will never be used by millions (or some large number) - because they are the perfect tool for them. Inventive people have been creating custom tools for their own use for millennium - it is our age of assembly line thinking that forces us to least common denominator working conditions that is at fault here. I have always thought that these issues, in this case, rest more with the CPU architecture than with our software approach - why can't we get binary languages that allow the machine code to be reverse compiled into any language we want? Even var names could be maintained, along with other information, if the binaries had a metadata file attached to them. Virtual machines put some of that power back into our hands, but even writing vm's are somewhat of a rocket science outside of the usual programming skill set.
Whether Steve J is living in the past or not, I will agree with him that multi-platform development environments and worse, x-platform UI frameworks, have historically produced ugly, semi-usable apps. So I agree with Apple's stance on this - remember, this is not keeping ***anyone*** from developing or distributing iDevice apps - it just means you can't sell them through the AppStore. And the AppStore belongs to Apple. Most of the 'rights' that are being bandied about in these discussions are, like free speech rights, limited to your protection from government interference. If I set up a store to sell quality art, no one can come in and demand that I sell their paintings of dogs playing poker (not that I want to open up that discussion - just an example). I do think the last post was the most interesting in this thread, in that Apple really needs to consider offering additional programming paradigms through XCode (or its successor). You can do anything you want in plain old C, and I mentioned that IMHO Objective-C is a very good language. But FP and other approaches are advancing over O-O and if the iFuture is to be rosy, there will need to be new tools available to the programming community. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
