No it isn't. As I said below, Hecl works fine on phones much slower than the iPhone. Ok, you don't want to do a big, huge complex app in a dynamic language, but they would be just fine for quick one-offs. Just like with regular computers...
Yeah, but that's not very interesting, so I don't include it :)
You can do big complex apps in dynamic languages though. But iPhone is a somewhat restricted environment (not THAT restricted, really) where you are encouraged to use as small a footprint as reasonably possible.
> Yeah, but that's not very interesting, so I don't include it :)
Stuff like PHP indicates that plenty of people are quite happy to do quick one off's. Or Tcl/Tk for Unix, or VB for Windows. Scripting is a very sensible idea, and phones are quite capable of handling it these days.
I think it's extremely interesting creating something that opens up development to more people.
Sure, those languages are better, but the point is making programming more accessible to more people (something Python has done quite well too, indeed).
Still, I would suggest people who are seriously interested in developing for the iPhone to check if plain Objective-C works for them, first.
My recipe is:
- Objective-C for the minimum necessary to deal with the iPhone specific APIs.
- plain C for critical parts which need to be optimized for speed and memory consumption.
- your favorite embeddable language implementation (mine at the moment is TinyScheme, but I've also used Lua) for scripting.
Also, consider that often you may need to include libraries written in c or c++. This is trivial to do from Objective-C.