Don't Kill OSX Development

In response/inspired by "OSX Isn't for Developers"

BTW, making Xcode free helped kill Metroworks CodeWarrior and a few other IDEs. We're left with free ones, like Eclipse and NetBeans, and with a few pay ones like InteliJ and Visual Studio. What will charging for Xcode do in that environment? It's still much cheaper than CodeWarrior was, than Visual Studio is, and still cheaper than the reasonably cheap InteliJ.

But I agree with this article's conclusions about the ability for tinkering. He focusses more on being able to just compile something. Yeah, if there's no easy access to a standard C compiler Mac OS X is hosed. But it's not THAT hard to make a compiler, just to make a good one. There will be a free compiler in one form or another. The problem is throwing up barriers to the young teenagers who are just learning to code.

I learned Basic on a TRS-80, Java on a Mac using CodeWarrior (student edition, that my dad bought me for Christmas), and then HTML (from a Netscape 4 book), JavaScript (copy-paste-modify off the internet), and PHP (copy-paste-modify, then reading documentation). All of that was easy on a Mac, and I didn't have to pay for any of it (Dad paid for one thing, but me never).

I did not learn Visual Studio, Visual Basic, and C#. I had a Mac anyway, but I would never have paid for that. In college I learned it because I got it free via the "Academic Alliance". That's how MS gets people into their development platform. I learned Flash in two 30-day trials (v4 and v5), but then quickly left it all behind when I lost access and had to replace my site with plain HTML (later PHP). That was Adobe's mistake, since I was never hooked on their platform.

Finally, I declare Mac OS X to be the best operating system because it has the UNIX tool chain merged with a good UI and plenty of applications, including commercial games. Linux fails because the UI is fugly and the installation and maintenance process is horrid. It also has only a few free games to play, which don't hold a candle to the commercial ones. On Windows, it's great when you live in Visual Studio, but step out of that and you run into the need for UNIX tool emulation or ports. That's just because most geeky developers use UNIX tools, so all the tools are in UNIX style. I inevitably install Cygwin, and sometimes get fed up enough to run Linux as my primary OS. But at home I always keep a Mac because it works AND it's pretty.

BUT ... take away the ease of developing on Mac OS X and you've destroyed the platform. Realize that with the mobile movement in progress (iOS, tablets, "post-PC") one of the few remaining uses will always be software development. Don't turn the "truck" into a pretty-boy toy that is useless for people who need to do real work and unnecessary for the average person.