Steve Jobs just ruined the iPhone for Clojure

by va_coder on 4/9/2010, 1:30 PM with 35 comments
  • by dkarl on 4/9/2010, 3:29 PM

    The first comment is apt: "This is NOT thinking differently Apple."

    It's not? Can you give another example of a similarly idiotic restriction imposed by some other company?

    On the bright side, this confirms that Steve Jobs is in reasonably good health. Nobody would establish this kind of Orwellian control unless they believed that they or a blood relative would be around to pull the strings. Right? He wouldn't be working to bequeath a death grip on the iPad software ecosystem to his successor at Apple.

  • by allertonm on 4/9/2010, 3:17 PM

    FWIW, despite being the author of a Clojure/Cocoa bridge, I was never under any illusion that this would ever be able to run on the iPhone.

    (See "Why is this a terrible idea?" at http://github.com/allertonm/Couverjure)

  • by jeandenis on 4/9/2010, 3:37 PM

    I think Apple's got better things to do with their time than to police against the 3 Clojure iPhone/Pad developers out there using some kind of cross-language compiler.

    Plus, if Apple did start enforcing against Clojure->Objective-C, it'd be sort of cool. Imagine Clojure in the big time... the HN headlines: "Functional programming keeps Steve Jobs up at night" or "Steve Jobs and Rich Hickey seen outside coffee shop in Cupertino -- Eric Schmidt feels lonely". Right, not gonna happen, keep cross-compiling away.

    (There is a warm space in my <3 for all that is Clojure and I haven't touched another language in 2 weeks)

  • by baddox on 4/9/2010, 3:26 PM

    This should be a relief to any Clojure (or other non-iPhone language) developers. This completely removes the major headache of worrying about Apple, the App Store, etc.

  • by jcromartie on 4/9/2010, 3:31 PM

    There was no JVM to start with, and there was already a no-interpreters clause. They had a long way to go.

  • by patrickk on 4/9/2010, 2:45 PM

    It's like Apple are just coming up with yet another reason for more technically-literate people to either jailbreak (or not buy) the iPad.

  • by pmjordan on 4/9/2010, 2:58 PM

    I'm not aware of a Clojure runtime that'll work on the iPhone, but I'm disappointed that apps written in Scheme (Gambit, etc.) won't be allowed in future. Or at least, it'll be a lottery whether or not they notice that the C code isn't human written, which means the risk is too high for anything serious.

  • by va_coder on 4/9/2010, 4:14 PM

    I don't really understand the level of concern. I'm expecting a kick-ass slate based on a more open platform like Android or Ubuntu to come out in the next year.

  • by mhd on 4/9/2010, 3:25 PM

    HCI experiments? You can still do those in Clojure. You just can't put them in the app store.

  • by marknutter on 4/9/2010, 9:27 PM

    Change your subdomain to fullclojuredis in protest

  • by anonjon on 4/9/2010, 3:52 PM

    So use an android?

    If apple really wants to drive developers away from their platform, so be it.

    Luckily there is no monopoly on smartphones.