C4 Day Two: drunkenbatman moderates a panel discussion
The last event of C4 was a panel discussion moderated by once-famous Mac blogger drunkenbatman, whose command of the technical and social sides of the Mac community makes him an ideal choice for corralling discussion among the conference’s collection of leading developers and personalities.
The discussion lead off with a big question: what would developers like to see from Apple? Consensus was that Apple needs to open up in many ways, encouraging more communication from their own developers to the outside and particularly allowing outside access to their Radar bug tracking system. Several developers had horror stories of tracking down bugs in Apple’s code that were readily known internally at Apple but all but unknown around the web.
The second question flipped it: what technologies are developers not giving due attention to? Steve Dekorte bluntly suggested that Apple scrap QuickTime and AppleScript, and this spawned a whole discussion of the relative uses and indignities of AppleScript. Language was, of course, a hot topic. Several developers on the panel and audience members alike would like to see scripting languages like Python become first-class citizens in the Apple development world. The best people had to say about Objective-C was that it didn’t get in their way, but nobody seemed passionate about Apple’s long-term dedication to the language.
Panel members were divided on whether or not Apple should freeze Carbon (the legacy means of Mac OS programming) and forcefully encourage Cocoa adoption. Wolf had a strong point on this topic: Cocoa and Carbon are a mismatched pair, in that Cocoa controls the event loop and Carbon allows your application to control it.
The conversation moved more towards business for a while, and Apple’s habit of ripping off or swallowing up third-party developers was a juicy topic. Brent Simmons had a fantastic analogy on this tip: “it’s like you’re a small mammal in the time of dinosaurs: you’ve got to watch out, but you’re faster and you can eat their eggs.” A developer at Rogue Amoeba summed it up: “sometimes they buy you out and sometimes they screw you over.”
The latter part of the panel discussion was taken up by the subject of Digital Rights Management and its role in software anti-piracy. Most developers on the panel were vehemently anti-DRM, but warmed up a bit to the idea of an Apple-provided “LicensingKit” that could be easily embedded into applications. Fitz had a fine point: “all DRM is weak DRM because you hand out both lock and key.” Gus Mueller was more blunt: “I just hate DRM.”
The panel discussion was a nice flight across a big landscape of topics, but could’ve benefitted from less allotment of time to DRM and language wars. Still, it was a fun and involving close to the day.