And that was true of the languages back in the 70s when there was an antitrust suit against IBM. Backend code is usually the easiest part of any application, at least in my experience. Making it work under the specific environment of the OS is far harder and more time consuming.


No, "disingenuous" is you pretending you couldn't infer that I was talking about changing platforms.


I'm not sure what you're getting at. Yeah, if you want to develop specifically for the Mac/Cocoa, it's no easier to port to X11 or Win32 than the equivalent iPhone to Android or WinMo or WebOS. But under MacOS, you can create your program with Qt, wxWidgets, Java/AWT, Gtk+, Tk, etc., ad infinitum. And from a pure programming point of view, you can use C, C++, and Objective C, like on the iPhone, plus Python, Perl, Ruby, Tcl, Scheme, Fortran, Ada, Haskell, COBOL, etc., the first four of which are installed by default. None of this is allowed on the iPhone.


No, it's closed. It's not *as* closed as iPhoneOS is now. People are free to implement "hardware" (a Flash player) to support Flash applications. (Heck, someone could implement a Flash player in actual hardware. That would be kinda neat.) You are not allowed to implement a compiler. But if you decided that you wanted to move to Java, for example, that would be a gigantic headache, and amounts to lock-in.


I'm afraid I didn't follow that at all. Java is far more than just a language. Most notably, it's a virtual machine architecture, but so is Flash. It's also a set of standard libraries. I'm not sure what "controls" you're talking about.