[Openmcl-devel] Mac App store: will CCL apps fly?

[Paul Krueger]

On Oct 22, 2010, at 8:08 PM, Andrew Shalit wrote:

> 
> On Oct 22, 2010, at 1:58 PM, Ron Garret wrote:
> 
>> 
>> The simple fact of the matter is that Apple does not care about its developers.  It has never cared about its developers.  It doesn't need to.
> 
> The truth of this depends on how you define "care".
> 
> If caring means letting developers use whatever tools they want to create whatever software they want, then Apple doesn't care.
> 
> If care means keeping developers in the loop about important upcoming changes, or being transparent about how sales channels work, then Apple doesn't care.
> 
> On the other hand, if caring means providing a venue where even very small developers can make a living from their work, then Apple cares.
> 
> If caring means giving you a shot at getting your software into the hands of hundreds of thousands of people without issuing a press release or doing any advertising, then Apple cares.
> 
> So it depends on what kind of software development you do and what your goals are.
> 
> I'd say Apple doesn't care much about hackers, either on the development side or the user side.  The concerns of Lisp programmers are similar to the concerns of Unix/Linux users who want to be able to get under the hood of their machine.  Even that phrase --- "get under the hood" --- is instructive.  You can't get under the hood of modern cars the way you could twenty or thirty years ago.  The same thing may be happening to computers, at least consumer-level computers.  Some things are lost by that, certainly, and hopefully those options won't be cut off completely, and we (hackers) should certainly push back.   But this isn't about users versus developers.  It's about the kind of user, and the kind of developer where Apple is making distinctions.

Andrew's assessment is the fairest I've seen in this discussion. I would add to it that Apple's array of documentation, sample code, tools, and other forms of developer assistance is absolutely unprecedented in my experience. So saying that Apple doesn't care about developers is just silly. Of course they care more about the customer experience because that fundamentally determines their success or failure. But there is clearly a symbiosis between those two that Apple understands very well.

I've been doing and/or managing software development of one sort or another for almost 40 years. Although I'm very weary of reimplementing many of the same things over and over as new hardware/software/tools platforms come into vogue, I also accept that this will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. That's the price you pay for also being able to do new things with new capabilities. I don't know exactly how things will shake out, but expecting that any currently comfortable development process will continue indefinitely just isn't realistic. I'm old enough to remember all the resistance to Linux and to OSX and to many other new ideas, when they first arrived too. Developers understandably don't like anything that obsoletes something they've put substantial effort into, but all I can say to younger developers is: "Get used to it".

Paul