» Letter to Steve Jobs

Hi Steve,

For the past 6 months I've used the programing language Lua in all of my iPhone apps. I'm not alone, EA and Tapulous, two of the App Store's best selling development shops, find Lua to be a huge benefit to iPhone development. But now Apple has demanded that we restrict ourselves to 4* sanctioned languages.

The typical response to complaints about the restriction is "Use Objective-C, no big deal". I agree that Objective-C is a very good language, but so is C. So why bother with Objective-C at all? C is powerful, fast, flexible and the foundation of iPhone's OS. But there was a reason NeXT chose Objective-C over C 20 years ago; it's the same reason today's developers want the freedom to use a language of their choice.

You don't force designers to use Photoshop, you don't limit musicians to major chords, yet Apple is limiting developers. A computer language is the creative tool of a developer; it is our paint brush, it is our Gibson.

In 1994, you told Rolling Stone, "Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have a faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them. It's not the tools that you have faith in -- tools are just tools."

Objective-C is not a filter for crappy apps, it's not the magical ingredient for an amazing app, it is just a tool. Have faith in developers again, don't shackle us to a single tool, let us decide which language fits our needs best. If the iPad is “magical”, why does its app approval process feel like Salem circa 1692?

Corey Johnson

* I'm including Javascript in the number of languages allowed even though the wording of §3.3.1 seems to limit its use.