

Ask HN: when can a vendor of a platform decide its development language? - DeusExMachina

There is a lot of debate on Apple forbidding all languages except C, C++ and Objective-C on iPhone OS. Reading one more article on this topic, a question popped into my mind: why Google App Engine is different?<p>Google App Engine is a platform that allows only Java (or better, JVM) and Python. Ok, it is a web platform, but like the iPhone and the iPad are mobile platform. Yet nobody ever complained about this limitation.<p>I'm not saying they should have. I'm not implying what is right or wrong, I haven't decided by myself yet. So what I am asking is: where we draw the line? Where is the border between being able to decide the language for a platform you own and not being able to? We should complain also about Google's decisions? Or we should not complain about Apple's ones?<p>Are iPhone OS and GAE comparable? Maybe this is a silly question, but I'm not able to decide by myself, so I'd like to see someone here on HN to elaborate on the subject. Thank you.
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pg
Obviously any platform is only going to support a few languages natively. But
you can always use tools that compile from other languages into the native
ones. What's uniquely overreaching about Apple's new rule is that you can't
even do that anymore.

On App Engine you can run Java code that has been generated by a compiler that
translates Scheme source code into Java. Apple's saying you can't do that. You
can't write programs in anything except C, C++, or Objective-C.

In theory, anyway. No doubt what they'll do is selectively enforce it just to
ban competitive threats like Flash. I kind of wish they were forced to enforce
it rigidly, because then they'd start to feel the consequences of doing
something so opposed to the way software development works.

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inerte
You can develop in C#, and have it converted to Python and run it on the App
Engine. Something you can't do on the iPhone.

Google does not limit the language that you can use to write your app, only
what languages its App Engine can understand. Very, very different.

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wmf
Apple disallowed options that used to be allowed. Also, there are many ways to
deploy Web servers, but Apple is the only way onto the iPhone.

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fleitz
The limitations to what you can do with App Engine are largely technical
rather than largely the result of contractual obligations. That's why everyone
is in a tiff about App Store.

