And as you point out there is no evidence that it is the complaining that made Apple reconsider. It could very well be something entirely different, e.g. the FTC probe.
If the FTC probe (or the rise of android) has anything to do with it then I doubt we'll ever know, but I'm all for taking this on face value and believing them when they publicly admit to listening to their devs. It's a nice thing to be able to hold them to at a future date.
It certainly looks like they are sincere about it, and if they are not this will hollow out their position in the future quite a bit and they did not have to give any reason at all.
Listening to your developers is not such a bad thing, after all.
And I'm not saying we shouldn't believe Apple when they say they've listened to the developer community. I am saying that such decisions usually factor in a broader spectrum of reasons. At the very least, there are may examples of Apple not budging on issues, regardless of the huge ruckus.
I'm also not saying we shouldn't complain. I am saying we should cut on the drama, try to understand Apple's rationale for their decisions, and figure out a way to meet them midway. Or as Apple say in the intro to the App Store Review Guidelines - "If it sounds like we're control freaks, well, maybe it's because we're so committed to our users and making sure they have a quality experience with our products. Just like almost all of you are too."
That's a very valid complaint imo, except for the 'sucky', was that present in the original?
> "Apple just want to prevent you from porting your app to a competing platform, them Nazis"
Are you sure about the 'them Nazis' bit in this one ? Otherwise, again, that's a valid complaint.
> I'm also not saying we shouldn't complain. I am saying we should cut on the drama,
Indeed.
It doesn't even have namespaces — something that has been standard in every language since the '90s. Instead, you must stick a two- or three-character prefix on all your class and function names (some people even recommend prefixing method names) and hope that nobody else happened to pick the same two or three characters for theirs.
For another example, it has a strongly dynamic OO model, but a singularly unhelpful static type system that is shackled with C compatibility, leaving the language in this awkward limbo between static and dynamic, where you're offered all these tantalizing paths that turn out to be blocked by walls.
Yet another: It has monkey-patching like Ruby, but it lacks the language or library support to do it anywhere near as cleanly (which is saying something if you know how messy Ruby monkey patches can be), to the point where some parts are almost necessary and others are almost unusable and it's not obvious at first where the pitfalls lie.
(On the other hand, a lot of people hate Objective-C for pretty bad reasons too. There seems to be a legion of PHP converts who really want to write PHP in Objective-C.)
Also, you have to be careful to distinguish between the framework and the language. Cocoa is an excellent framework that does a great job playing to Objective-C's strengths. It's the language that I'm criticizing here.
While 'sucky' isn't up to HN's style standards, and a more reasoned response is always preferable, I personally don't think the prohibition Apple put in place was sufficiently reasonable to merit a reasonable response.
Uh, what? These seem like perfectly legitimate complaints to me. Why shouldn't you be allowed to use the tools you already know how to use? Why shouldn't you be allowed to write once and run anywhere?
It's not like there is some equal subtle list of pros and cons that need to be weighed, here.
It's even better if you convey a suggestion on how specifically to improve things. But often the complaint itself contains that, implied.
For example, a what-you-would-call whiny complaint of "waaaaa... don't touch my arm with that torch, it burns!" contains the rather useful suggestion (implied) to stop touching my arm with that torch. To be more relevant, if Apple suddenly says you can't use any language but XYZ, and we go "waaaa...." what we are saying is "let us use XYZ". I hope that is obvious and implicit in all such cases. :)