Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

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Because Apple's dev tools have always had such a huge impact on the software development industry, and web-based variants of those tools will obviously completely change the industry?

Apple is not that important. Seriously. They make very pretty products. But they aren't shaping the developer landscape, outside of a few segments of the industry. I went to YAPC::NA a week ago...350-ish people, 10-15% Mac users. I went to a Sun-sponsored, Open Source focused event a few months back...~1200 people, 15% Mac users, tops. Even at Startup School (where folks like to talk a lot about "wow, look at all the Macs!"), 800-1000 people, 30-40% Mac users.

It's really easy to look around at all of your friends and say, "Wow, everybody is using this, and thinks it's awesome! It's really going to take over the world!" But, your friends are not a representative sample of the development world.

So, Objective-J is a cool idea, and if it helps 280North (who are smart, nice, cool guys doing great work) get their product out the door faster, I'm excited about it. But, I've also looked at Objective-C and Apple's development environment, and came away far less than impressed. While it may be superior to working in C++ (or plain ol' C), it's probably not even better than Java for getting things done (and that's not all that good), unless your problem set happens to overlap very closely to what it was designed for.

There are already several revolutionary JavaScript libraries and toolkits out there (jQuery, YUI, ExtJS, Dojo, Mochi, etc.), and they're all making an impact...but let's keep the hyperbole under control.

Apple is not that important. Seriously.

Even with a mere 10% market share, Apple is so incredibly important. Since 2000, they have continually set the standard in industrial design across the electronics industry (and even beyond it). Beyond that, they've also completely changed the music industry. They went from zero music presence to 80% market share in music players, and the number one music store (not just online music store). The iPhone is already redefining the cell phone industry.

Sure, they may be small, and maybe they'll never get bigger, but you can't for a second claim they aren't important.

True, but as SwellJoe said, they are not that important, particularly in the space in which this topic resides. Their contributions regarding UI and design have definitely been impressive, but we're talking about dev tools here. The mass adoption of iPods and MacBooks hasn't yet resulted in an equivalent increase in Objective-C, and I would think that it would do so even less with web technologies.

How many Objective-C books were on the shelf at barnes and noble before apple used it? Now there is always one or two and I expect that to grow with iphone uptake.

Two whole books? Why, that's as much as .1 times the number of Java, Python, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, or even Lisp books on the shelf at your average bookstore! Get ready world, here comes the Apple development juggernaut!

My comment was merely to point out the silliness of hyperbole. I'm not picking on Apple, or its fanboys. You like Apple products, and development tools that emulate Apple products, and that's wonderful for you. But, it doesn't alter the fact that Apple has historically had little to no impact on the web development world (web design, they've had a huge impact on...actual code, not so much).

Cocoa was designed from the ground up to build GUI applications. Java certainly can't claim that. Cocoa was designed 20 years ago at NeXT, and in all that time, it has barely changed. Interface Builder is an incredibly powerful tool.

Cocoa has also enabled very small teams at Apple (and outside of Apple) to build really world class consumer products in incredibly short time frames, something you don't see in the Java world. GUI's are definitely Java's weakest point.

To quote myself, "unless your problem set happens to closely happens to overlap very closely to what it was designed for". If the GUI is the majority of your problem, then perhaps it's a great tool (I'd be hesitant to say it's the best tool, as I found it to be less pleasant to work with than, say, Python with one of its many GUI toolkits).

If you like it, and enjoy it, that's wonderful. I merely think the hyperbole in the OP title was pointless. Apple is not reshaping the web app developer landscape. (WebObjects didn't exactly set the world on fire, for example.)

WebObjects was way too far ahead of its time. You're absolutely right that so far Apple has contributed very little to the web app space. We'll have to see what happens in the future.

Your comment is spot on, except the first paragraph. Apple's dev tools may not be used by the majority of developers, but they have influenced the industry.

One such example is Obj-C and NeXTStep's influence on Java (http://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html). Of course it was really NeXT's influence, but it was still Steve Jobs and company behind the scenes.

I guess my comment seemed, somehow, to be praising Java. Java is a setting sun, and becomes increasingly irrelevant in web apps by the day. The JVM, on the other hand, might turn out to be very relevant, due to the increasing number and quality of dynamic languages that run on the JVM. And the JVM is not something that can be claimed to have lineage from Objective C (since ObjC has no VM).

Anyway, I just think the hyperbole is way out of place. Apple is not going to dramatically alter the web app development landscape. Some people (mostly people who've built Apple desktop apps) will find Objective-J a more comfortable way to build web apps, and that's wonderful. But it's not a world-shaking thing.

You said: "[b]ecause Apple's dev tools have always had such a huge impact on the software development industry".

I simply provided a single example that refuted your conjecture that Apple had no influence in the development world. It's irrelevant what either one of us thinks of Java or its future; Java was a significant, mainstream development tool and it was impacted by Apple development technologies.

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