Steve Jobs Weighs In On iPhone Programming Language Mandate

Dotnaught writes "Greg Slepak, founder of software company Tao Effect, wrote Apple CEO Steve Jobs to complain about Apple's mandate that iPhone applications be originally written in C/C++/Objective-C. Job's response was to endorse a post by John Gruber on the Daring Fireball blog. Jobs called it 'very insightful,' suggesting Gruber's prediction that third-party iPhone development tools are out might be right. Jobs sent a second reply that also doesn't bode well for third-party iPhone development tools: 'We've been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform.'"

Comments

Re:None of this would've happened...

[drinkypoo]

Speaking as someone who has to deal with 64 bit flash on linux

this was hard once, but then we got nspluginwrapper to make it easy. Then Adobe released 64 bit flash "beta" for linux (works better than many of the released versions that have passed, AFAICT) and now it's super easy. But since the iPhone doesn't come in different flavors like that (yet?) then you're not going to have that same kind of problem. Consequently, 64 bit flash is a red herring. Stop it.

Apps running using native platform tools do fairly well, cross-platform apps suck a lot of the time. You windows users have seen this too -- itunes, quicktime and safari are dogs on windows because they had to import all their own libraries.

So you're saying that because Apple is bad at cross-platform, it's a bad idea? As far as I can tell, you've offered only evidence of Apple's incompetence.

On Apple machines these are lighweight apps that are fast.

Go on, pull the other one. On Apple machines, iTunes and Quicktime are both still chunky and funky. Safari is pretty speedy, though it is not as speedy as WebKit on Linux . Or in other words, it's not really that fast. It's slower than the performance-oriented competition. Hell, it's slower than what it's based on. I consider that a failure. Apple does NOT write small, efficient applications for most any purpose.

And let's face it, as nice as open software is, working well is what sells units, ideology is secondary.

Bullshit. Polish is what sells units. Apple's stuff is shinier. But there's plenty of room for a backlash when users find that all the apps they want are on all the other phones, and the only one who doesn't have 'em is the iPhone. Give it a year and this will start to happen.