Link Details

Can ObjectiveC compete with productivity of Scala ?

No, Objective-C is a very rare language coming from the Java World, and XCode... well VS2010 seems nice than XCode

vi and command-line is nice compared to XCode. The hoops you have to jump through just to debug unit tests is ridiculous.

Although I'm no Mac user, I would be very surprised if nobody at all steps in.

I don't think many people realize how much we depend on Java today - security applets (ie online banking), the various Eclipse/netbeans/intellij implementations not even used for Java development (ie C++), not to mention the many open source projects and libraries out there, ...

This is not only about Java development - but mainly about USING it.

I wasn't that surprised to hear this actually. I figured it was only a matter of time, what with them not supporting Java on the iPhone and all.

But realistically, it was probably the best business decision for Apple, when you consider that all of the following are true:

* Developers are not Apple's primary target market.

* Almost no home users use Java desktop applications or applets anymore.

* Macs are basically irrelevant in the application server arena because Apple missed the boat when it comes to server virtualization. There are hardly any businesses serving their Web apps on Macs.

* Although internally developed desktop Java applications are popular in business and science, Apple has not achieved very much market penetration in either of these areas.

Given all of these points, as well as the fact that Apple has been barely maintaining their Java implementation as it is for the last several years (often taking months to patch critical security holes that other vendors have patched), I really wasn't surprised to see this announcement. But given how little Java is actually used on Macs, I'm not sure this announcement actually has any real impact on anything.