ghaven

I'll second that it's really the other way around in both my own experience and the general perception I've always had from others.

> You can learn all you need to know in a day to get "hooked".

So what? That's not the point, of course you can become strongly interested in something in a short space of time. The problem is you really can't learn to code in that time.

> Then just variations on that theme, lookup other functions etc.

This statement is so broad as to be meaningless. Would you say you know quantum mechanics just because someone wrote down a few axioms for you and the rest is 'just' busywork and maths?

> At school, you're going to be in a class where 50% couldn't care less about programming, and the rest will just slow you down. Self teaching is much better.

If the self teaching environment is available and good, of course it is. However, there's nothing special about computing here, and one reason we have schools in the first place is that the environment is not always otherwise available.

Regardless of qt, you can actually already write android and iOS apps in python via kivy (http://kivy.org/#home).

It includes a domain specific language for creating widget trees called kivy language, which I hear is not unlike qml (though I haven't tried the latter), though it all maps straight to pure python if you want to write things that way.

I think this could be misleading...a kivy apk has a minimum size of about 6-7MB. When installed it will extract the contents but the apk remains, which more than doubles that size on the device storage. The extraction can be done to the sd card (or internal equivalent) so as not to take up system internal memory space.

It's certainly another downside of course, but to be clear to anyone reading the apks are much less than 25MB. And 25MB actually sounds like more than I'd expect even uncompressed, but I haven't looked at it much.

That's still a problem unfortunately, though less so than it used to be so your perception might depend on when you last used it.

If you're interested, you could try perhaps FlatJewels from the play store. It's a simple game with a fairly quick loading time (except the first run, which is always slower). I don't know if the author put effort into specifically optimising its start time, but it's probably fairly representative of what's currently normal.

How about kivy (http://kivy.org/#home) for something of a middle ground? It's a python graphical framework making heavy use of opengl via an optimised cython interface. It has fairly powerful access to the android api through pyjnius (which gives direct access to java classes) or pyobjus on ios (which is less mature but has the same idea).

On the plus side, since it's native to the device (albeit with a different interface), you can do pretty well for speed through the already optimised graphical interface and through optimising your own apps with cython or even C modules if necessary. Other pros include pyjnius/pyobjus for api integration as above (some of which is already abstracted as python modules), and neat perks like the ability to mostly develop on desktop without an emulator.

On the other hand, it has some of the same disadvantages as html5, such as non-native widgets. So by no means a perfect solution, but an interesting contender.

This misses the point. The real problem was the question of whether Microsoft was using its position as a major software vendor to warp the web browser market in ways ultimately highly detrimental to user experience. The popular answer is probably 'yes', as a generation of web developers cry out in despair.

The problem is that by bundling this particular application, and by its behaviour with that application (ignoring standards etc.), Microsoft was able to massively distort the web market based on its monopoloy position rather than technical merit. This affected the development of the web for years afterwards - even to this day!

If you agree these problems existed (I don't think it's a controversial opinion...), then the conclusion is precisely that MS should not be able to set the default web browser, because allowing to do so would be ultimately more damaging than giving users a slightly poorer experience when they have to install their own. This is a quantitatively different situation to that of many other default apps, where MS neither wants nor tries to monopolistically dominate a a massive emerging market segment - but if they did, perhaps the same questions would come up again.

Edit: So I guess the summary would be yes, MS does get to set lots of default applications, but this is exactly what the case was about. Should they actually be allowed to do so? Even if sometimes it's okay, what about the times where this lets them dominate for reasons totally unrelated to technical superiority?