[squeak-dev] Re: [Pharo-project] Talking to Steve Jobs about Scratch.

Lawson English lenglish5 at cox.net
Thu Apr 22 22:01:15 UTC 2010


Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> On 22.04.2010, at 23:15, Lawson English wrote:
>   
>> Stephen Pair wrote:
>>     
>>> It's hard to argue that Apple is a monopoly when they have ~7% of the PC market and there are 3 significant competing platforms in the smartphone market (RIM, Android, and Windows).  Now, I'm not defending Apple's stance on alternate languages, but I do think these decisions are based mostly on engineering compromises in an effort to constrain the problems they will face as they evolve the hardware and software.  I mean, Objective-C itself is just about the epitome of a language born out of engineering compromise (an early attempt to get a Smalltalk inspired OO system running in a C based environment).
>>>
>>> It's a much simpler problem if they only have to worry about breaking Objective-C and web apps all using official, documented and published APIs moving forward than if they have to worry about a mixed bag of apps all using various idiosyncratic technologies accessing undocumented APIs.  As for the AppStore, it's a practical solution to the problem of viruses and malware (there is certainly demand for computers that just work, where viruses and malware are not an issue...the virus problem in Windows has been quite successful in fostering an appetite for that).  The AppStore not an ideal solution to that problem, but they are having to work with 40 year old operating system technology here.  The AppStore has also been quite successful in dealing with some of the peripheral problems software publishers face (like distribution and payment processing) and in so doing has created a viable business model for thousands of small software publishers.
>>>
>>> I don't mean to come across sounding like an Apple apologist, but the arguments here seem to be very one sided.  I simply want to express an alternative view.
>>>
>>> Of course, having said all of this, I would still like to be able to use Smalltalk to write apps for my iPhone.
>>>
>>> - Stephen
>>>
>>>
>>>       
>> All of what you say is quite possibly true. HOWEVER, Scratch on the iPhone isn't really Squeak on the iphone, but a very tiny subset of squeak's capabilities exposed to grade school programmers. As far as I know, there's no way in scratch to directly access ANY iphone capability. Its all done in the scratch programming sandbox, so the ban on Scratch is just an overly literal reading of Apple's ban on 3rd party IDEs.
>>     
>
> The banning of Scratch has *nothing* to do with the fact that it's written in Squeak. All the other Squeak apps are still in the app store.
>
> Apples language restriction only applies to iPhone OS 4. That is no going to be released before the summer.
>
> Apple has not removed a single app because of what language it was implemented in. Yet.
>
> Now I neither like the removal of Scratch nor the possible future restriction of languages. But lets keep to the facts.
>
> Maybe we could see a raise of hands who is actually working on a Squeak app for the iPhone / iPad?
>
>
>   

I'm not sure if you were clarifying what I wrote or correcting something 
I said the wrong way...

Either way, I don't quite see how what you said is any different than 
what I said.


Lawson





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