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Comment by dfranke | Hacker News Reader

Okay, this uproar has just passed the threshold of ridiculous. "No Private APIs" is well-understood to mean that you can't call undocumented system libraries, not that you can't implement your own. Can we as a community please go back to talking about something else now? Erlang, maybe?

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I recommend you not ask people to post Erlang articles. I did that once and so many people submitted Erlang articles that pg banned me for causing an e-riot.

He banned you for that? Really? I was under the impression that such protests, when justly called for, were condoned by management.

Honest. I was a bit surprised myself. Oh well.

edit: This was my comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775727

This time I'm half-anticipating a flood of articles about Apple banning Erlang from the iPhone.

http://twitter.com/raganwald/status/12056378037

What about an article about how you can't use erlang to write iPhone software?

Of course you can. The emulator is hand-coded in C so it is perfectly legal to run it. Now compiled erlang code is just binary data, the emulator handles it as such, and it isn't illegal for an app to generate data. So what is the problem?

The comments of the article say the term "Private APIs" isn't defined in the document. So, even if Apple actually meant "undocumented system libraries", that's not what its document strictly means. And until a judge says otherwise, we may want to stick with that strict (though silly) interpretation.

Anyway, this document changes nothing: Apple was able to arbitrarily ban any app from the very begining. They just want to appear legit.

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