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

iTunes for Windows is using non-native APIs

[dotwhynot]

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.” -- Apple

Is Apple actually calling iTunes for Windows for a sub-standard app? That perhaps should be banned from the platform? Apple themselves are using non-native API intermediate layers such as CoreFoundation and CoreGraphics in their implementation of iTunes for Windows.

Re:They want devs to choose

[TheRaven64]

Not sure about Google, but we (GNUstep) have a project to implement UIKit. We already have pretty much all of the Foundation framework that the iPhone exposes, and our CoreGraphics implementation will hopefully to be finished as a result of this year's GSoC. A lot of UIKit is very similar to stuff we've already implemented for AppKit, so there's a lot of potential for code reuse. We've approached Nokia for funding the development of UIKit, with the N900 as a primary target, but if anyone at Google (or anywhere else) is interested in funding some of the work then please let me know.