[aristoxenus]

That post really puts the "C/C++/Obj-C" thing into much starker relief than the "wish I could use lisp" discussion. Geeks can get around 3.3.1 if they're clever enough; replacing a democratizing technology like Scratch, on the other hand, may be impossible.

That said, if their app really was an interpreter, I'm surprised it made it into the store in the first place. And if anything, the typical Scratch output of a crayon-drawn animation designed by a 13-year-old only bolsters Jobs' point about cross-compilers bringing down the average app quality. But I'm very impressed that they had Scratch working on the platform and I hope Apple can find a way to incorporate that educational mission into their world-domination strategy...

[stcredzero]

They built it on top of Squeak. That thing is one of the most straightforward VMs to port. The runtimes execute bit-identical. Years ago they were on 40 different platforms, and I've lost track. It's an incredibly elegant architecture.

[aristoxenus]

That's cool. Should have said "happy" instead of "impressed" -- knowing nothing about the technical side, I was imagining the impact of letting kids program ipods/iphones. They must have loved that.

[jfoutz]

One javascript implementation is the lively kernel, here http://www.lively-kernel.org/

I'd bet there are others.