HELLO, KPCHNZ

2010-08-25

That guy Michael Arrington says of Cappuccino:

Developers we've spoken with have praised the framework, calling it one of the best ways to make applications with little programming knowledge.

Let me fix that for him:

Developers we haven't spoken with have praised the framework, calling it one of the best ways to make web applications without having to swallow bucketloads of morcellated fecal matter through a beer bong, as has traditionally been the case.

Cappuccino isn't some kind of dumbed-down web development. It's actually significantly smartened-up web development, and I'm just oh so fucking thankful for its existence.

Now, I have a gentlemen's agreement with Nakahara not to rant publicly about developing for a certain mobile platform, and that's sensible because most of what I have to say rhymes with DUDE, I fucking just fundamentally can't reconcile with the concept of having to tongue-bathe Adolf Hitler's nutsack just to get permission to install my own software on my own motherfucking device, much less sell it, and which oh by the way is called an iPhone and is made by Apple, those motherFUCKING CONTROLFREAK COCKSUCKAAAAAAARRRGGGGGGGG ARRRGHHHH ARGH ARRRRRRRRGHHHH--well, you see where that goes. (I do prefer it as a consumer, though, of course. At least until one of these other douchebags figures out how to make a phone.)

But, largely due to the bad taste that fellating the iPhone Developer Agreement left in my mouth, for the past year or so, I've gone back to doing mostly internal corporate network apps. And although I still love Mac programming (at least until Apple somehow fucks that up too), in modern U S and A my current area of development almost always means web-based apps. Or "web-delivered" apps, as I've taken to calling the newest breed of them.

The tools, for the most part, are still brutally, horribly shitty--like what we had for desktop development ten years ago. Like Newton Tool Kit and CodeWarrior had a developmentally-delayed inbred ketamine baby that is intellectually stuck at the mental age of three even though it is actually fifteen. Dumb editors, caveman code completion (or worse), no static analysis, and reverting back to mainly using print statements to debug because the debuggers still really are just that shitty.

BUT: Objective-J and Cap make the process so much less painful that... that... um, well, that I can at least?bear it, and maybe even get excited with it from time to time.

There's no fucking DOM freakishness, no CSS koans to unravel, and if you don't push the envelope you barely even have to deal with browser idiosyncracies (as long as you're man enough to tell IE6 to go suck a bag of dicks to its face (not actually an easy thing in corporate IT)). You lay out views and subviews, you set targets and actions, you post notifications, you send messages ten miles in the snow uphill both ways with square bracket syntax... for a Mac programmer, the mental shift is measured in hours, not days. Huge swaths of Nakahara's Mac/iOS code run under Cappuccino with extremely minimal 'porting'. Basically just changing variable declarations from NSString *foo = bar to var foo = bar, and NS to CP.

To a guy shifting from Mac development to web development, it feels like a gift from the mythological and nonexistent Christian god.

So it was with some trepidation that I read that MOTOROLA horfed down 280 North today. I'm truly happy for the founders of the Cappuccino project, because rumor has it that the money was quite decent and, like I said, I'm grateful. But let's face it: Motorola hasn't made a good product since my 1996 StarTAC. And while Cappuccino is open source, now all the best baristas work at oh god that metaphor made me puke in my mouth.

Anyway, it's not likely to be the frothy bloodspattered frenzy of destruction that we saw when Oracle sodomized Sun and flayed ZFS alive before raping the corpse of OpenSolaris and pouring gasoline over the entire scene and setting it ablaze in an orgiastic methamphetamine-fueled episode of corporate testosterone and roid-rage. That's only because Cappuccino really wouldn't be worth much if it weren't open source. A technology like ZFS, as the fighterjet-flying pussyhound who's almost as consistently wrong as Bill Gates in his public prognostications knows, is some fucking awesome shit that you could totally monetize, if you reined it in and controlled it, instead of letting human progress advance unencumbered.

Cappuccino, though--while also awesome--really isn't. It's still too young and it's github followers are meaningfully active. So, even though Motorola seems like a relatively dumbshit company overall, they probably won't actively seek out Cappuccino's destruction.

But they still might suck a whole lot of the oxygen out of the room, depending on what constraints our heroes Francisco, Tom, and Ross suddenly find themselves under. What we have is already very good, but I hope it continues to get better.

(but Atlas sucks hopelessly, and I actually hope they just kill that stillborn project, lol)