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Comment by mirkules | Hacker News Reader

Why it survives in a world of alternatives? There are no alternatives if you want to distribute on the most popular mobile platform. Personally, I really dislike Obj-C, but since I want to create apps on the iPhone I have no choice. Unfortunately, making a good business decision sometimes means going against your personal feelings. I think that's how a lot of other people approached it too. If the iOS platform changed overnight to Lisp, we would see articles titled "Why Lisp survives in a world of alternatives"

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The author is not arguing about how come objc is not dead, but about why Apple hasn't replaced it with a more popular language.

> There are no alternatives if you want to distribute on the most popular mobile platform.

Symbian, Blackberry and Android don't support Objective-C as far as I know. Only iOS does, which is far from the "most popular" mobile platform, especially if you look outside Silicon Valley just for a minute.

[Edit] Also, for the record, you can program in C++ and distribute on iOS with minimal Objective C. I thought I'd point this out given my login name.

I think you both are arguing from different sides of "popular". You are stating popular by sheer numbers while he was stating it from a 3rd party developer prospective. I believe he was right in what he said.

> There are no alternatives if you want to distribute on the most popular mobile platform.

This statement isn't entirely true: http://www.appleoutsider.com/2010/06/10/hello-lua/ Cocoa is extremely strongly encouraged, but it's possible, under the current developer agreement, to distribute non-Cocoa applications on iOS.

> under the current developer agreement

This is what worries me. Objective C is the only safe way to go.

I'm interested to hear why solutions such as this: http://monotouch.net/ aren't an option? Price barrier, or are they not up to scratch?

For me it is the price barrier. Being able to use a language like F# on the iphone would be awesome.

There's already a price barrier in the form of the Mac OS computer you need to develop iOS apps. An extra $400 for dev tools you think would be "awesome" is a show-stopper?

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