iPhone programming (i.e. ObjC + optional C/C++) is harder than HTML+CSS+JS+(PHP/Python/Ruby/Java/whatever)?
Despite stuff what HTML is made for (like static websites), almost everything else is much easier to develop in ObjC with Cocoa (in some IDE like Xcode).
Let's take a simple 2D top-down game (like Legend of Zelda) as an example, with an inbuilt level editor and some way to save/load games on/from your local disk (or for the web equivalent: somewhere in some database).
That is quite easy to do with ObjC. I, for example, started to learn coding with Visual Basic many years ago, and that example was my second project (after a few weeks of coding -- never ever coded before). (Ofc VB is way different than ObjC but they are similarly easy to handle.) The point is, leave some newbie alone with Xcode and he will manage to implement something like this (without much extra documentation because most stuff is straight forward).
Now, let's leave some newbie alone to implement that in HTML + JS + whatever serverside language he prefers. He maybe will fail already to setup the web server.
I know how hard web apps are, but the article isn't about that. It's about kids making static HTML pages, pre CSS and JS for everything except rollovers, which they certainly succeeded at.
Despite stuff what HTML is made for (like static websites), almost everything else is much easier to develop in ObjC with Cocoa (in some IDE like Xcode).
Let's take a simple 2D top-down game (like Legend of Zelda) as an example, with an inbuilt level editor and some way to save/load games on/from your local disk (or for the web equivalent: somewhere in some database).
That is quite easy to do with ObjC. I, for example, started to learn coding with Visual Basic many years ago, and that example was my second project (after a few weeks of coding -- never ever coded before). (Ofc VB is way different than ObjC but they are similarly easy to handle.) The point is, leave some newbie alone with Xcode and he will manage to implement something like this (without much extra documentation because most stuff is straight forward).
Now, let's leave some newbie alone to implement that in HTML + JS + whatever serverside language he prefers. He maybe will fail already to setup the web server.