Update: In the two years since I wrote this, Garrett has taken over the project and disputes a lot of things in this post. You can read his point of view here nanomsg was a once-bright alternative to ZeroMQ. The project had a lot going for it: It was a rewrite by the original author. […]
On practically Day 1 of Swift, it seemed clear that the future of the platform would change forever. I have begun to realize how sweeping that change will be. We’re at peak ObjC Here’s the TIOBE index for Swift, which shows a small, but growing, Swift community: And here’s the index for ObjC: See that […]
Lately there’s been a barrage of articles about how Apple is destroying the open web (because “app store, lol”) and it is Time Something Was Done About This: Apple’s paranoid approach to developer relations, and, I assume, relations with other browser vendors (and, in fact, relations to anything outside itself) is becoming a serious liability […]
I meet a lot of developers who have bought into the hype about open source. It’s great! It’s going to save the world from the perils of proprietary software! Or failing that, just produce free, high-quality software for many conceivable purposes. I’m a little more skeptical. But I’ve not read a proposal that adequately addresses […]
Peopls say that the state of Python packaging/dependency management/package managers are awful. Those people have obviously never done package management with iOS. Tools like CocoaPods exist to “manage” this problem. The reality is however that instead of shooting yourself in the foot, CocoaPods gives you a machine gun sentry that can obliterate all feet in […]
Enough people have asked me about the watch that I should probably put my thoughts here. Some background First, let me paint the picture for you. You’re sitting on $160 bn. You’ve tried paying dividends, but you just can’t pay enough without investors getting antsy. You need to actually put it to use somewhere. The […]
. 1 2 3 In early English history the right to “freedom of speech” only applied within the four walls of Parliament. In 1689, William and Mary acknowledged “That the Freedome of Speech and Debates or Proceedings in Parlyament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any Court or Place out of Parlyament”, a […]
There has been a slow chorus of poor anti-Python 3 articles lately. Today’s was Python 3 is killing Python. The article is “true” in the sense that it accurately reflects the author’s feelings, but the thesis is fundamentally wrong about the language, the language developers, and the community. Just for the record, there are some […]
Warning: this post wanders around a lot. Sorry. There was an article a bit ago about opening presentations in old versions of Keynote: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old. To open it, save it with Keynote ’09 first.” – I was greeted with this message today when I was about to publish […]
So there’s an article on HN today about how in-app purchase is destroying the game industry. There are a couple of problems with this theory. The original in-app purchase See, in the in-app purchase model actually predates phones. It predates video game consoles. It goes all the way back to the arcade, where millions of […]