I Love Walled Gardens, by Rory Marinich | Hacker News Reader

I Love Walled Gardens, by Rory Marinich

rinich.com

15 pointsnirmal12 comments

I like what you have said here, however I have another analogy that describes the part I disagree with.

The iPad is a 4 star restaurant, my linux box is my kitchen. I like 4 star resturants and they are not evil (unless they have a 90% monopoly on the market [and the food is crappy (Microsoft circa 2001)] [Apple might do this to in which case they are evil for being a monopoly not for being closed]). They are closed. I can't go into the kitchen and make food. But I can be inspired by the food I enjoy there.

The idea of teaching children to learn to program using iPad apps is some what intriging, however, I would compare it to http://dreamdinners.com/main.php?static=index its not the same as buying a cook book and being in your own kitchen. Or going to culinary school.

So yes we will see people using the iPad to learn to program , possibly, but I think there will always be those who prefer to learn on an open platforms.

ps. I think you might like this graph :) http://chris.smeder.com/essays/3_stevejobs.htm

That is actually a very good analogy. I'd almost forgotten what a good one was like.

That's a very apt analogy. I've got nothing against kitchens, but I think it would be nice if there were cheap gourmet lessons out there also. (My analogy is much worse than yours.)

> We lose nothing by having closed systems.

For good or for bad, for the past 25 years or so, programmers have effectively been subsidized in that the tools to design and create programs are effectively the same as the tools to run programs.

So every system, simply by installing a compiler, is ready to write computer programs.

Early computers didn't even have that step. They had assemblers and basic in the ROM. It was assumed that you were going to be writing programs; how else were you going to get computers to do what you want?

The iPad/iPhone is the latest and greatest step in that huge gap. A little uneasy, for some of us, perhaps, who grew up with QBASIC on-device-coding and can't imagine any other way.

But that is sort of a straw-man issue. You have to buy a real computer, so what? There's a closely-related, but way-more-troubling problem.

App review.

App review is painful. I've had two apps axed by Apple not for bugs or for security issues, but because, quite simply, Apple didn't like them (technically I had 3 such rejections; one was "reversed" on "appeal").

Think this doesn't affect you? It does. Google Voice found out the hard way. It was easier for them to rewrite their app in HTML5 then to talk Apple into letting it on the app store. Same goes for Google Navigation, that will never see the light of day.

For every app that you hear about, there are hundreds (I suspect more like thousands) of developers who had an app rejected and quietly went away.

That's the danger in these new devices. Not that you need a computer to develop for them. Not that the apps are sandboxed and you can't animate your icons or you require some ridiculous API nobody should ever need.

The problem is that Apple can--and, in fact, does--reject well-behaved applications that it simply doesn't like. Not just the buggy ones. Not just the malicious ones.

That's a thought that should chill every developer to the bone.

> It is not productive to spend an hour learning how to change the font on your computer’s clock.

Fair point. But is it better than not being able to change the font at all?

That's the Apple alternative. To have an idea in your head and not be able to implement.

Not because it's too hard. Because somebody simply doesn't want you to.

The argument I put forward (and I completely respect people that disagree with it) is that yes, it's okay to let somebody else control the clock font, because the clock font doesn't matter. I'd rather not have the choice to change it, because I've got twitchy fingers and am terribly good at procrastination.

Sure, the clock font doesn't matter. But the limiting form of the formula ("It's OK to let someone else control X because X doesn't matter") for lots of values of X is a recipe for total disaster.

We're watching this play out right now with Letters (http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/01/rage-against-the-m...) because apparently Apple Mail.app isn't good enough for power-emailers.

Nobody expects Letters to become the new default OSX Mail client. Rather, it will probably be a successful niche app for power users.

An app like Letters would never see the light of day on the iPhone because it "duplicates system functionality." Mail is good enough, so the logic goes.

But the iPad is not for powerusers. It is marketed to the general user. And for the average user, good enough is good enough.

But us power users want the nice hardware too ?

Why should we have to have the horrible experience... I don't think it's asking to have our cake and eat it, to be able to play with the toys we've bought?

Should all developers just stick to linux and windows ? - Your walled garden will be a much duller place for it.

This is the first blog post (or article or anything) which perfectly captured my own feelings on the subject of the iPad. Thanks to Rory Marinich for writing it. Great piece.

I had been dragging my feet about writing down my own thoughts, felt it both necessary and unappealing. But thanks to Rory, I have another option. I'll do what hackers (or in my case, aspiring hackers) do when they find what somebody else has which both a) accomplishes what they would've/intended to accomplish and b) accomplishes it in a superior manner: forget about mine and just use theirs.

I'mma link to this here post all over the fuckin' place.

Using the iPoad for programming could be tricky; there is an explicit policy disallowing user-accessible runtimes.

I know; I was informed of that after I wrote it. Shame. Web-accessible runtimes are still a possibility, but certainly that's not as cut-and-dry as having one in the App Store would be.

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