Simon Brocklehurst Asks: ‘Did Apple Make a Mistake Choosing Objective-C for iPhone SDK?’

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: (a) Most developers suck. Apple doesn’t care if they “can’t” or “won’t” write iPhone apps because they can’t or won’t learn Objective-C, because any developer who would say that is unlikely to write a worthwhile iPhone app. Picking up a new programming language is not hard. Picking up a language like Objective-C, which is only slightly expanded from regular old C, is even easier. I have never once met a good programmer who wasn’t willing and able to learn new languages. (b) Apple didn’t choose Objective-C for the iPhone arbitrarily; it’s inextricably tied to Cocoa Touch, and Cocoa is the entire foundation of the iPhone UI. (c) Apple doesn’t want existing “mobile” apps written in other languages recompiled for the iPhone any more than they wanted command-line DOS apps recompiled for the original Mac.

★ Friday, 25 April 2008