Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

Frank's iPhone developers are stupid! post on Planet Grep today made me a little grumpy.

Stating that iPhone developers are "stupid" because they target a restrictive environment is a bit blunt. Further suggesting that all their problems would magically go away if only they'd write "web applications" is criminally short-sighted at best.

While I'm happy to accept that some aspects of "web development" are "real programming" (and I have great respect for some of the people who identify themselves as "web developers"), I'm not so happy with the implication being made that "web development" has somehow obsoleted or replaced what has traditionally been considered as "real programming".

Frank seems to feel that all the things people want to implement natively could just as well be expressed as "web applications". I beg to differ. "Web applications" may be a reasonable choice for applications involving the manipulation of data in some way, but they're inherently unsuited to many other things.

The iPhone provides a lot of interesting hardware in a fairly compact battery-powered package. I can easily see people imagining things for it to do which Apple did not intend it for. Asserting that "web applications" could be used to implement all these things suggests a very unrealistic worldview.

I don't see "web applications" being used for interrupt handling or DMA or for that matter anything that involves networking on any level beyond the payload of a TCP stream. While those low-level things can conveivably be driven by "web applications" on the presentation layer, perhaps even down to the session layer, something underneath still needs to "be there".

It must be incredibly frustrating to target an environment which only allows "blessed" code to run, especially if the requirements for blessing are not all technical and the organization responsible for the blessing has commercial interests in not blessing code it deems to be threatening in some way.

I'm not very impressed with the "stupid" label being applied to people who can motivate themselves to target such restrictive environments and by extension to everyone who is (still?) not writing "web applications".