The author of the article wrote it using words. He didn't make a video or draw a picture, because words were the best way for him to communicate with other humans. For some reason, he wants a different way to communicate with machines, one that is inherently not the way humans communicate with each other.
I also agree with what others have said, that this is nothing but a bitch fest with nothing actionable other than we ought to be creating visual programming tools no one wants or needs instead of doing actual work. Sure, buddy. I'll get right on that.
This makes sense from Microsoft's point of view. Why would they pay a royalty fee on every copy of Windows when such a small percentage of users play DVDs? Especially when the fix is as easy as just downloading VLC.
This is going to sound arrogant and troll-y, but I assure you it isn't.
I don't look. When I want a new job, I stop ignoring recruiters and wait to see what comes along. I've never waited more than a few days to have a pile of interesting opportunities. (I also end up with a much bigger pile of bullshit talent-trawls, but that's beside the point)
I wish I could say this was a function of my being awesome, but I think it has more to do with the job market in my area (PDX). There just aren't enough senior developers to go around.
A lot more of these low-quality "research" pieces from The Atlantic are popping up on HN.
For a while, the only Atlantic pieces that trickled up were well-researched and well-thought. So now I'm eager to click on links from what I thought was a solid news source, but disappointed when I find fluff. Maybe they write less of those research pieces nowadays? I sure hope they don't become one of those link-bait crap news sites.
This isn't "running Java on iOS". This is cross-compiling Java to Objective C, the exact same way that other toolkits like MonoTouch, Titanium and RubyMotion do it.
The difference is important.
You can use this toolkit to target iOS from Java, but that doesn't mean that you get that language's infrastructure with it. I'd argue that's probably a good thing, but either way it's a far cry from "running Java on iOS".
MonoTouch does not compile to Objective-C. It compiles to native code, just like Objective-C, very much like Mono, CLR, or JVM do on other platforms. The real difference is running the compiler ahead of time, versus JIT. That, and disabling some functions that Apple deems bad, like keeping the ability to modify or emit code on-the-fly.
In the case of MonoTouch, you do get the infrastructure; they have the runtime ported over, and other libraries get compiled in as needed. So, in Mono's case, it IS "running .NET on iOS".
I see no intrinsic reason this could not be done for Java, although I don't know what this specific implementation is doing.
None of those things compile to Objective-C. They each provide a runtime for C#, Javascript and Ruby respectively with bindings to the underlying Objective-C apis. And they each do it in a different way, with different levels of layers between the normal Cocoa APIs.
What 'language infrastructure' are you talking about?
> You can use this toolkit to target iOS from Java, but that doesn't mean that you get that language's infrastructure with it.
I failed to understand you here. Assuming the Java language runtime is also available in native code, this is no different than using any other compiled language runtime like, say Objective-C.
This ought to be front and center on their site. What you wrote there turned a bunch of meaningless buzzwords into a useful product description. I'm now actually interested in the product. Well done!
I don't know. This is essentially saying that the way to solve problems is to add additional layers of abstraction. If you want to see a bunch of examples of why that's a bad idea, take a look at any J2EE application.
If we were really understood the problem we'd have come up with a way to make things simpler, not more complicated.
I think the real problem is that MVC is understood by different people to mean different things but they think they're talking about the SAME thing. Back end developers tend to think of the view layer as a trivial thing ("It's just HTML and Javascript! How hard can that be?") and front end developers tend to think of the model layer as trivial. ("Look, my backbone.js code is handing out and consuming JSON, how hard can it be to persist that?")
I also agree with what others have said, that this is nothing but a bitch fest with nothing actionable other than we ought to be creating visual programming tools no one wants or needs instead of doing actual work. Sure, buddy. I'll get right on that.