The author is right that we need to think outside the box but I think his argument is misleading. Historically, programming languages evolve and not leapfrog. I don't see why Objective-C cannot keep evolving while some other company is bold enough to research a new visual programming language that will result in a paradigm shift. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Author here. Good point, they are not mutually exclusive. I do think however it's not in Apple's culture to significantly move away from C/ObjC any time soon. For the time being, they are getting by well enough as is today. I think they'll continue to slowly evolve the language, but I'm not so keen to wait for major changes, and I'm hoping to get others onboard with me.

As a main language, I agree they're not looking to change anything for a long time coming, but they have made stuff like Quartz Composer (a graphical functional programming language) and Automator. There is a slim sliver of hope they may deem fit to create a HyperCard for the post-PC world. iOS touch interfaces would be the perfect place to reinvent programming as something other than text (since typing on a touchscreen is so painful).

Are you saying you want to take a crack at creating this new paradigm shift? Couldn't you argue that a project like RubyMotion is already doing some of what you are proposing.

No not really. Ruby is a fine text language but it offers no benefits or advantages like what I described in the article, safe maybe a REPL. But we can have that already with the Super Debugger, for example.

It wasn't a failed a transaction. They never said the transaction failed. I got a confirmation that the sale was completed.

It's failed if Coinbase suspected fraud and it's reversed.

From their Terms of Service:

> 3.5 When buying or selling bitcoin, you are buying or selling from Coinbase directly. Coinbase does not act as an intermediary or marketplace between other buyers and sellers of bitcoin.

Also from their Terms of Service:

> Coinbase may cancel or reverse potentially high-risk buys or sells of bitcoin, including those made using reversible payment methods.

Could very easily be that your transaction was flagged and then reversed. Your BTC was returned in full. If the price had gone in the other direction I doubt you would be offering to compensate Coinbase for the difference.

If it failed then why did they take 7 days to return my BTC? That's the benefit of BTC that things can be verified in a matter of minutes.

coinbase has been overwhelmed with increased volume and rapid fluctuation in the last two weeks. As staunch has said, to have only lost time in the transaction process and missed chances to get in or out at a particular price was an inherent risk in placing the transaction in the first place.

I have also been held up by coinbase delays in transactions over the last few days (though nothing was reversed), so I empathize with the pain. If you know of a more reliable and more quickly servicing online bitcoin exchange, I know many who would be happy to hear about it.

Yes, that's slow, but they gave you back all your Bitcoins. I get that you're disappointed about losing money trying to trade Bitcoins, but if this is how you react to this relatively minor problem you should not be trading Bitcoins yet. Problems like this are the norm right now.

That's fine that they can reverse transactions that are fraud. However after investigating the transaction and determining that it isn't fraud, then they should be on the hook for honoring the transaction. Incorrectly flagging legitimate transactions as fraudulent is their problem, not the customer's. They should either improve the algorithm or provide additional controls that give them confidence that a transaction is not fraudulent (e.g. two factor authentication. linking bank accounts and confirming a person's identity). If a person has completed all the security requirements Coinbase has, then that person should be able to make a transaction with the confidence actually will clear.

You cannot reverse bitcoin transaction. It either happened or not, determined by the broadcasted block chain.

It's a Coinbase transaction and not a Bitcoin transaction that's at issue.

It looks like Coinbase has a problem managing their float of Bitcoins and/or serious risk management problems.

There was a story yesterday about someone wiring over tens of thousands of dollars and not hearing back for 1-2 weeks.

My theory is that Coinbase are performing some kind of proprietary trading and have burnt themselves badly, and to recover losses, they are front-running customers and delaying trade settlement.

I've had a terrible customer service experience with Coinbase too: http://amit.roon.io/an-open-letter-to-coinbase

Funny how whenever a company gets enough bad publicity to actually hurt their bottom line, suddenly their customer service runs a bit smoother.

I'm a big fan of Parse even though I prefer Firebase as a developer. This is sad news because I think they were one company that was executing really well and would have been successful on their own. Even though Facebook and Parse say they are not going to shutdown the service we all know how that story goes.

They may not be the majority but there are acquisitions where a service keeps running. This is one of them.

Parse is awesome, and you may be right, but for me being owned by Facebook is a deal breaker.

The justification for this frothy valuation is that somehow they will turn the browsers of pictures into buyers of products. It is a difficult task and wish them luck but I still don't understand why they would need $120 MM to accomplish it.

"Turning the browsers of pictures into buyers of products" is an excellent turn of phrase, but I think it kind of misses the point. In actuality, Pinterest is about to become the HSN of the internet. It plays to all of Facebook's weaknesses:

- Pinterest makes money on sales rather than ads, through referral links

- Pinterest makes identical money on users with accounts and anonymous users

- Pinterest has exactly the users who have money and want to spend it

- Pinterest runs on greed, envy and materialism rather than lust and boredom

It will be interesting to see how it plays out. They've already had a big setback in that they were rewriting or inserting referral links and they had to stop. I'm not sure what the conception is moving forward, but I'm sure $120M will help them figure it out. Unlike a lot of the other big names being bandied around now, there is a sense that they're trying to build a company rather than find the fastest largest way to sell out.

They need it to IPO or to sell to a bigger fool.

We don't know if some of the $120MM is for secondary / cashing out existing investors / employees.

Why is that the justification exactly? Seems like they have a variety of monetization options. That's one, but it's not the one I was thinking of and it would require a lot more work with more risk than other alternatives.

Except RubyMotion isn't an intermediary framework. It's implemented directly on the Obj-C runtime.

Copying files willy nilly without any etiquette around packaging doesn't seem like a good standard to me.

Let's see go out of business or just change your name. Seems like a no-brainer to me

The no-brainer is letting someone else define your marketing strategy & the name of your business?

If more small & mid-sized companies fought these silly claims there would be less of them.

This is the author here. I have fixed those issues. I had just written the code and post in TextMate using markdown. I should have checked the code before I put it up there. My bad. As for putting create. I wanted to illustrate that they are creating a new object and don't stress on using create as naming convention.

I agree, it's definitely not boilerplate material but it is certainly a good "starter kit" for a beginner dev, assuming of course that he will need all these libraries for building his app. Otherwise he just downloaded one big bloated project template.