Steve Jobs just ruined the iPhone for Clojure | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs just ruined the iPhone for Clojure

fulldisclojure.blogspot.com

96 pointsva_coder35 comments

The first comment is apt: "This is NOT thinking differently Apple."

It's not? Can you give another example of a similarly idiotic restriction imposed by some other company?

On the bright side, this confirms that Steve Jobs is in reasonably good health. Nobody would establish this kind of Orwellian control unless they believed that they or a blood relative would be around to pull the strings. Right? He wouldn't be working to bequeath a death grip on the iPad software ecosystem to his successor at Apple.

Maybe Jobs's brain has gotten infected by whatever disease he is suffering from.

FWIW, despite being the author of a Clojure/Cocoa bridge, I was never under any illusion that this would ever be able to run on the iPhone.

(See "Why is this a terrible idea?" at http://github.com/allertonm/Couverjure)

Yeah, you've got some good points. My main concern is long term, when Clojure-in-Clojure really takes off. That's the dream that was just shattered.

I think Apple's got better things to do with their time than to police against the 3 Clojure iPhone/Pad developers out there using some kind of cross-language compiler.

Plus, if Apple did start enforcing against Clojure->Objective-C, it'd be sort of cool. Imagine Clojure in the big time... the HN headlines: "Functional programming keeps Steve Jobs up at night" or "Steve Jobs and Rich Hickey seen outside coffee shop in Cupertino -- Eric Schmidt feels lonely". Right, not gonna happen, keep cross-compiling away.

(There is a warm space in my <3 for all that is Clojure and I haven't touched another language in 2 weeks)

They don't have to selectively target the few Clojure developers, they just need to lump them in with the group "not-our-compiler".

It's not really an issue of if you can get away with it. It just betrays the fundamental attitude that Jobs has shown since first introducing the Macintosh. He appears to firmly believe in a closed, tightly controlled platform. I wonder how the world would be different if Woz had taken over and Jobs had wandered off to do something else. And stayed there I mean. Who am I kidding. People would probably be fighting each other for NeXT machines instead of Apple boxes.

I for one would be happy with that scenario :)

This should be a relief to any Clojure (or other non-iPhone language) developers. This completely removes the major headache of worrying about Apple, the App Store, etc.

It's a good thing to think of problems as opportunities. I'm not so sure about thinking of opportunities as problems...

There was no JVM to start with, and there was already a no-interpreters clause. They had a long way to go.

Interpreters were fine as long as the user could not download or create code. A lot of games use a scripting language (Lua, Python, and other proprietary languages (SCUMM for the Monkey Island remake, for example).

... and there's a CLR port of Clojure, so the scenario was not out of reach (see Mono Touch)

Some apps have interpreters, yes, but they are in violation of the agreement.

A truckload of games have interpreters, coming either from indie developers or major publishers. None of these will be able to update their games to the new SDK.

Regarding the interpreters, I used to be right, but it changed at one point. Quoting Henk Boom on the Lua mailing list:

[[ I thought this was already the case. From an excerpt of the agreement on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_OS#Java

"No interpreted code may be downloaded or used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Documented APIs and built-in interpreter(s)."

I've read that the "or" in "downloaded or used" was originally an "and," but that Apple changed it at some point. ]]

> None of these will be able to update their games to the new SDK.

The ban on interpreters significantly predates the new SDK.

While Clojure is currently targeting the JVM and CLR as compilation targets, there are longer-term plans to target LLVM and other platforms as well. There's no reason a compiler couldn't produce native code.

It's like Apple are just coming up with yet another reason for more technically-literate people to either jailbreak (or not buy) the iPad.

I'm not aware of a Clojure runtime that'll work on the iPhone, but I'm disappointed that apps written in Scheme (Gambit, etc.) won't be allowed in future. Or at least, it'll be a lottery whether or not they notice that the C code isn't human written, which means the risk is too high for anything serious.

I've heard some rumors that this will do it:

http://xmlvm.org/overview/

(Don't tell Steve Jobs about it though)

I don't really understand the level of concern. I'm expecting a kick-ass slate based on a more open platform like Android or Ubuntu to come out in the next year.

... with a crummy user interface.

I'm posting this a lot, but I'm not just trolling. I'm trying to get people to grasp the fact that UI is the reason for Apple's success.

Everyone else treats the UI as an afterthought or for whatever reason is incapable of designing a good one. The UI should be of primary concern.

This is particularly true of mobile apps. As your device and its screen gets smaller, UI design becomes exponentially more important. A bad UI can be tolerated on a 1920x1080 desktop, but not on a phone or a small pad.

I completely agree; too many underestimate the importance of UI. In fact I once did too, and used to scorn Apple products as just being 'the same as everyone elses with a nice UI'. I was completely right, but I missed the point - UI is such a big deal that the majority of what users want is 'the same as what I've already got, but with a better UI'.

I haven't used Android (or Chrome OS) yet, but Google seem to have a pretty good grip on UI too, so I'm hoping it's similarly good. If not, it's an open system, we can build a better one.

I remember the first time I tried OSX and saw Expose. I realized then and there that that feature alone was worth the $500-$1000 premium that I would pay for a Macbook.

That's right. IMHO, Expose is worth $1000.

(Of course, now everyone has copied Expose... but you get the idea.)

I saw it and thought "wow, what a sad way to pull up window groups". In fact, I am still mad at apple for not allowing me to move windows around with my keyboard, not allowing me to group windows, and not allowing me to define where new windows go. Seriously, I am capable of understanding the implications of terminal windows being tiled (those implications being terminal is freaking uasable).

Edit: also, seriously, i like to group workspaces by task. This is very anoying when I launch say, mvim, and it opens a window in some workspace already containing mvim. Same with terms and browser windows.

My first thought was that old joke about NASA spending a million dollars to invent a pen that writes in space, and Russia using a pencil.

MS didn't think of expose because Windows' taskbar already let you select arbitrary windows.

really? I own neither an iPhone nor an Android phone, but I've used both in passing, and the iPhone was neither particularly intuitive nor particularly snappy.

To honest, I think the goodness of their UI is often overstated.

Compared to what?

"I've used both in passing" is the key phrase here.

Agreed. I had used lots of cellphones and mobile devices BEFORE I tried iPhone. iPhone & iPod Touch were just light-years ahead of anything I experienced before. And it was all about UI/UX superiority.

I own a N1. I thought I was finally up there with the big boys, but I used an iPhone for a few seconds and I could already tell the difference.

Why is C better for the UI then clojure?

Yeah I cheer for the open things as well, but people got to get over this notion that people like Apple because it's cool and trendy. The UI seriously is a cut above, and they're driving the market. There's a reason why attack of the iPad clones is coming this summer.

I agree.

So, since Apple is still designing great UI but apparently is going insane, maybe it's time for a brand new Apple to be born. Younger, same UI greatness, not insane.

HCI experiments? You can still do those in Clojure. You just can't put them in the app store.

Change your subdomain to fullclojuredis in protest

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