yeah but he does have a valid point. Java's IDEs are just so much better than what ObjectiveC has to offer and having a GarbageCollector makes you're code much less error prone and increases productivity. So it kind of does seem like a stoneage enviroment coming from Java.
Not having GC on the iPhone is unfortunate, and I think there's a good chance we'll see it in OS 4.0. But Apple developers have a culture of not trusting garbage collection. It's irrational, but it runs deep through most of the experienced Apple devs I know. Thankfully, of all the manual memory management environments I've used, Objective-C's is the best.
Saying java IDEs are better than XCode is not a valid point. It's an opinion (and an arguable one at that).
As to memory management: given that Cocoa's retain/release/autorelease is not painful and my most agonizing debugging sessions with java all seem to revolve around theorizing WTF the garbage collector is doing and why... Well I think the productivity opinion is arguable as well.
