I'm not sure that's entirely fair - I read it more like "I'm used to A, which means I find A much easier to use."
And in this context, I think that's fair enough. There are far more developers out there with more than a passing familiarity with Java & the Java toolchain, than there are for Objective-C/XCode.
By the sounds of it, it will be easier for those developers to develop for Android phones than the iPhone. Regardless of the relative technical merits of the platforms viewed in isolation, the ability to re-use your existing Java chops is going to be valuable.
(I speak as someone who has done equally small amounts of development in both environments - personally, I prefer Objective-C development)
Exactly. Being a hardcore Android fan, I was really looking forward to some high-quality developer-perspective anti-iPhone rant but the whole post can be really summed up by "I know Java programming better than OS X programming so I had an easier time developing for Android than for the iPhone".
yeah but he does have a valid point. Java's IDEs are just so much better than what ObjectiveC has to offer and having a GarbageCollector makes you're code much less error prone and increases productivity. So it kind of does seem like a stoneage enviroment coming from Java.
Not having GC on the iPhone is unfortunate, and I think there's a good chance we'll see it in OS 4.0. But Apple developers have a culture of not trusting garbage collection. It's irrational, but it runs deep through most of the experienced Apple devs I know. Thankfully, of all the manual memory management environments I've used, Objective-C's is the best.
Saying java IDEs are better than XCode is not a valid point. It's an opinion (and an arguable one at that).
As to memory management: given that Cocoa's retain/release/autorelease is not painful and my most agonizing debugging sessions with java all seem to revolve around theorizing WTF the garbage collector is doing and why... Well I think the productivity opinion is arguable as well.
And in this context, I think that's fair enough. There are far more developers out there with more than a passing familiarity with Java & the Java toolchain, than there are for Objective-C/XCode.
By the sounds of it, it will be easier for those developers to develop for Android phones than the iPhone. Regardless of the relative technical merits of the platforms viewed in isolation, the ability to re-use your existing Java chops is going to be valuable.
(I speak as someone who has done equally small amounts of development in both environments - personally, I prefer Objective-C development)