Submission + - Why I will not be developing for iPhone or iPad (github.com)
dto1138 writes: The REMIX THIS GAME contest (featured earlier this week on Slashdot) is forbidden by Apple's iOS SDK terms of use. Neither the original game, its remixes, the remixing activity, or any of my other games can run on iPhone---they are written in Common Lisp, and as many Slashdot readers know, earlier this year Apple banned cross-compilation and restricted iOS app development to a tiny whitelist of languages: C, Objective-C, C++, and Javascript. I've put up an opinion piece called "Thoughts on iOS games", exploring the questions raised by Apple's requirement that programs be written "originally" in one of the white-list languages, and conclude that the distinction they would like to make at app-approval time----that is, the black-or-white distinction between an approved app and a rejected app---is empirically unintelligible because (among other reasons) a permitted development technique (writing by hand "originally" in C) could produce absolutely the SAME output as a BANNED development process (using an old Objective-C preprocessor to compile a hand-written program to C, the way Objective-C was originally implemented.) Unintelligible (yet ruthlessly enforced) barriers to entry are not the sign of a healthy market, and I've decided accordingly not to develop for iOS.