iOS is anti-Unix and anti-programmer

Oh, bullshit. Do you really think there is someone siting around at Apple dreaming up new ways to take away your freedom?

No. There fucking isn't.

I'm a huge believer in small, composable components. And I know that developing against closed platforms sucks. Being able to dig down into the source code of every layer of your stack is critical to the understanding necessary to build high quality software. Libre, Gratis, and Open are all key elements of the software I choose to use to do many mission critical jobs, every day of my professional career going forward.

But you know what?

The people at Apple just want to make damn good products. They are proud as hell of those products. They work very hard to make them that damn good.

Freedom isn't free. There are costs associated with development, complexity, opportunity. Free is a strategy that only few can afford to execute. Google has to vary the gratis, libre, and open dials with their products every single day to paint the benevolent picture they count on to keep their recruiting pipelines full, while still building high quality products on time and budget.

My Girlfriend's Android phone (a highly rated model) is a horrible piece of crap next to the iPhone. It lags, crashes, has UX issues, flimsy hardware. The iPhone is a glorious, crowning achievement of engineering that still, years later, Microsoft and Google are struggle to replicate.

I'm no dumber for owning an iPhone. It gets the job done: It makes phone calls. It settles arguments at the bar. It lets me cut in line at Chipotle. It wakes me up in the morning. It keeps me entertained. It makes me smile every time that little orange plane animates by as it goes into airplane mode.

It just fucking works.

You want to talk about freedom? I'm free from thinking about memory management. And processor utilization. And data loss. If it stops working, I'm free from worry because the Apple store makes everything better. I am free from all of the horrible things that can go wrong on my production servers.

Unless something does go wrong on my production servers, in which case I'm free to be away from my desk when it happens. And I'm free to drive aimlessly without worrying about getting lost. I'm free to call a cab, when I just don't feel like walking home.

In context, my iPhone represents every last bit as much freedom as my blinking cursor in an empty vim window.

     Mostly because we, as software developers, have 
     failed to create frameworks that are fully 
     composable.  

Big companies would like nothing more than for programming to become something unskilled workers can do. I would like that too, but from a different perspective.

Programming is not really like assembling Lego blocks. And if you pick any other industry, taking a close look at how new developments are made, you'll find that sharing in software development is a lot more common and a lot easier.

After all, when building new software, you don't have to write your own OS, your own compiler, your own debugger, your own libraries built on top, or even your own domain-specific framework. Well, unless you have the not-invented-here syndrome.

And what does "fully composable" mean anyway?

     The real problem is we still need to program.

I find it much nicer to use the term autonomy, which can be seen as "meaningful freedom". To some people having a commandline interface (which they do not know how to operate) is not a meaningful freedom to have at all.