I think C++ would have done fine with a suitable toolkit, which presumably they would have built based on the stuff from Be, in my alternate history where Apple bought Be instead of NeXT but somehow still got Steve Jobs. Given the choice, I'd rather do a GUI framework in C++ than Objective-C, but I don't think it's that big of an advantage, at least if you can restrict yourself to a sane subset of C++.
Java... harder to say. I would say that no, Apple could not have done as good a job using Java as the basis of iOS, because Apple doesn't seem to be very good at the things needed to make a language like Java run fast. Perhaps if they had contracted out the right bits to Sun rather than pulling a Google and building their own VM, it could have worked OK.
I think that Objective-C is a pretty good language when you take into account the context of running on a UNIX system with lots of pre-built C libraries around, because of the ease of talking to C. Perhaps even the best choice, in that limited context. But I don't think much of Apple's rise can be attributed to that choice of language, even if it did end up being a decent one.
> I think C++ would have done fine with a suitable toolkit, which presumably they would have built based on the stuff from Be
BeOS, while a nice operating system, was notoriously difficult to program for, largely due to the use of an asynchronous API.
> because Apple doesn't seem to be very good at the things needed to make a language like Java run fast. Perhaps if they had contracted out the right bits to Sun rather than pulling a Google and building their own VM, it could have worked OK.
The "Apple" JVM pretty much is a licensed Sun JVM with extra bits. It's also of comparable speed to the Sun JVM; the performance gap between Apple Java 1.6 and Sun/Oracle Java 1.7 on a mac is comparable to that between Sun/Oracle 1.6 and 1.7 on Linux.
> But I don't think much of Apple's rise can be attributed to that choice of language, even if it did end up being a decent one.
Certainly not entirely. However, one advantage that iOS did have early on was that it wasn't totally horrible to write for, which had been a traditional affliction of smartphone OSes. Possibly they'd have come up with a decent C++ API, of course, but then again possibly they'd have come up with something like the Symbian API.
Java... harder to say. I would say that no, Apple could not have done as good a job using Java as the basis of iOS, because Apple doesn't seem to be very good at the things needed to make a language like Java run fast. Perhaps if they had contracted out the right bits to Sun rather than pulling a Google and building their own VM, it could have worked OK.
I think that Objective-C is a pretty good language when you take into account the context of running on a UNIX system with lots of pre-built C libraries around, because of the ease of talking to C. Perhaps even the best choice, in that limited context. But I don't think much of Apple's rise can be attributed to that choice of language, even if it did end up being a decent one.