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Ask HN: Why Apple and Google impose the languages used to build apps?
I understand that this could've been relevant few years ago, when smartphones used to be inadequate for the task.
But this is no longer a thing.
So why would Google and Apple hand-selected for us a couple of languages each for building apps on their platforms?
- moocowtruck 9y agobecause companies that size enjoy putting developers through massive amounts of pain for fun :(
- Eridrus 9y agoI don't know about Apple, but Google doesn't force you to use a specific language, they just only support a handful. And at some level your language has to be able to interop with the OS. Even before Google announced Kotlin, people were already using it or Scala to build apps. React Native is another example of an unsanctioned effort to write apps in JavaScript. So I don't think your premise is true: neither Apple nor Google impose a language, they just only support a small set of languages officially.
- tinus_hn 9y agoUnlike open source where you have a hundred choices that are unsupported (most of them abandoned), they have a few choices that are supported and work reasonably well. Also people tend to whine about objective-C and Swift but these languages enable you to easily build things that are almost impossible to build in most other languages.