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Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

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Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#311

Post by Turing_Machine »

rbanffy wrote: post #244
timclark wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Version control also seemed an issue - commercial Smalltalks had tools like Envy - but all the projects I observed in the telecoms world seemed to have a senior developer doing nothing but merging images for the duration of the project.

Indeed. Having source files helps a lot. Smalltalk images suffer from Amish Bread Syndrome. Not being able to build your image from sources and sources alone is disturbing for me and I learned OOP with Smalltalk (later moved to Actor on Windows, but, still, without source code as text files).

Okay, I'll bite. "Amish Bread Syndrome"? The Googles do nothing.

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#312

Post by biot »

msbarnett wrote: post #295
Zev wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so much if you want to do any iOS work.

If doing iOS work isn't worth five dollars to you, than how much you can be said to "want" to do it is up for debate.

I get the impression everybody is preaching to the choir here for the most part.

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#313

Post by rbanffy »

rbanffy wrote: post #237
mechanical_fish wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love emacs and use it every day. And I'm glad that it's free software. But if Apple offered to keep my Mac's emacs install up to date for $4.99 I would pay in a heartbeat. I have to periodically check whether my version is out of date. When it is, I have to find the download URL, click on it, remember to come back when the package has downloaded, and run the installer. I have to do this on all of my machines. Sure,…

Paying is not the point. If paying for the software were easy for everyone who has a Mac everywhere, I would feel a little bit uncomfortable, but that would be all. My point is that this move may effectively shut off parts of the world that have no access to the Mac App Store. Don't get me wrong: I like Apple and used Apple computers since my early days as an Apple II developer. My main computers run Linux, but I lik…

Just as a side note that nicely illustrates how politics may interfere with this, when I got my first Apple II (a II+) it was actually a clone (http://orbita.starmedia.com/~cobit2/propagandas/exato_ago85....). At that time, importing computers to Brazil was prohibited. If I wanted to travel abroad, law mandated strict limits on how much money I could carry and buying an Apple II directly would be impossible. There were alternatives, smugglers that could bring almost anything you wanted, but then it would be a crime...

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#314

Post by rbanffy »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #311
rbanffy wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Having source files helps a lot. Smalltalk images suffer from Amish Bread Syndrome. Not being able to build your image from sources and sources alone is disturbing for me and I learned OOP with Smalltalk (later moved to Actor on Windows, but, still, without source code as text files).

Okay, I'll bite. "Amish Bread Syndrome"? The Googles do nothing.

http://www.armchair.com/recipe/bake002.html

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#315

Post by spitfire »

jws wrote: post #30
pilif wrote: post #26

Once the old free Xcode 3 has vanished, this neatly puts an end to stuff like Homebrew or MacPorts. I really don't care about paying the $4, but for many people without credit cards or unwilling to use iTunes/the app store, OSX just has become a lot less useful.

Fortunately Homebrew and MacPorts can just ship a gcc and get on with things.

Why do they even need to compile on your system? They should be shipping binaries for 99.99999% of the users out there and an easy way to recompile for that last gentoo holdout ^W^WHPC system.

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#316

Post by biot »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #311
rbanffy wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Having source files helps a lot. Smalltalk images suffer from Amish Bread Syndrome. Not being able to build your image from sources and sources alone is disturbing for me and I learned OOP with Smalltalk (later moved to Actor on Windows, but, still, without source code as text files).

Okay, I'll bite. "Amish Bread Syndrome"? The Googles do nothing.

The Googles lead me to Amish Friendship Bread, which requires a starter that you have to get from someone else. Thus, without the starter you can't compile your bread from sources. At least, that's the best I can come up with in three minutes. :)

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#317

Post by wmf »

mmastrac wrote: post #269
A1kmm wrote: post #231

I'm an academic who develops Free / Open Source software and distributes libraries and binaries for the Windows, x86 and x86_64 Linux and Mac platforms along with the source. One important library generates C code based on a domain specific language, links a shared object and uses that; on Windows and Linux, we ship a cut back gcc and libtools to do that; libtools doesn't work on the Mac (at least last time I looked…

The GCC toolchain can link Mach-O binaries without using any code from Apple. Building GCC cross-compilers like this is a pain, but crosstools takes a bit of that away: http://www.kegel.com/crosstool/ Basically, you can generate your own binaries and ship them under the GPL. No Apple needed. I'll ask for more info from someone I know who built an OSX cross-compiler under Linux.

Who said anything about cross compiling? It sounds like he'd be fine with regular GCC+binutils. (I don't see anything about Mach-O support in the ld manual, though...)

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#318

Post by potatolicious »

msbarnett wrote: post #293
msg wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was free, so I don't how you can call it anything but erecting a barrier to entry to developing POSIX apps on the Mac. You don't just need $5, you need a credit card number. Like many other things in computing, the price to play has gotten steadily cheaper over time. When it gets more expensive we should ask why. It makes sense for Apple's future of curated computing, but it's definitely another dick move.

> When it gets more expensive we should ask why. They just plowed thousands of engineering man-hours into significantly overhauling both the infrastructure (huge amount of work around LLVM) and interface of Xcode for the Xcode 4 release, addressing a substantive number of long-standing complaints along the way. This release is by far the biggest overhaul of the product in the last decade. All of those engineers cost…

A single footlong sandwich may be a significant sum for people not in Western, industrialized countries. But that point is secondary to the fact that even $5 is a barrier for beginners.

I think people are objecting because they themselves happened into programming as a passion and career - I know I did. They found some tool, probably for free (QBASIC for me) that got their feet wet initially, and that's how they got their start. A beginner who is neither sure nor convinced that programming is a good thing to pursue is unlikely to spend even a footlong's worth of money on it, and we've lost yet more potential future engineers.

Also, the fact that Apple has poured a significant investment into building these tools says nothing - they've been pouring a significant investment into their dev tools for years and offered it for free. Their competitors have also poured enormous sums into dev tools that are available for free. When the status quo of the industry is free tools (and the few that are for-pay are getting cheaper every year), one can question why Apple is the odd man out in a sudden reversal.

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#319

Post by [deleted] »

kjksf wrote: post #282
A1kmm wrote: post #231

I'm an academic who develops Free / Open Source software and distributes libraries and binaries for the Windows, x86 and x86_64 Linux and Mac platforms along with the source. One important library generates C code based on a domain specific language, links a shared object and uses that; on Windows and Linux, we ship a cut back gcc and libtools to do that; libtools doesn't work on the Mac (at least last time I looked…

Are you really saying that you can't afford to pay $5 from your own pocket for XCode 4? What price, other than $0, would be acceptable for a tool that took years of effort by a team of programmers and cost Apple tens of millions in programmer's salaries to develop?

[deleted]

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#320

Post by [deleted] »

kjksf wrote: post #282
A1kmm wrote: post #231

I'm an academic who develops Free / Open Source software and distributes libraries and binaries for the Windows, x86 and x86_64 Linux and Mac platforms along with the source. One important library generates C code based on a domain specific language, links a shared object and uses that; on Windows and Linux, we ship a cut back gcc and libtools to do that; libtools doesn't work on the Mac (at least last time I looked…

Are you really saying that you can't afford to pay $5 from your own pocket for XCode 4? What price, other than $0, would be acceptable for a tool that took years of effort by a team of programmers and cost Apple tens of millions in programmer's salaries to develop?

[deleted]
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