Yeah, I had a brain fart there -- I knew it was Paul Graham but somehow typed Allen. I edited the post to fix it, but apparently the thread title doesn't update even if you change the post title.

Paul Graham, for anyone who doesn't know him, was one of the creators of Viaweb (which he sold to Yahoo) and now heads a sort of venture capital group that helps startups called Y Combinator. He writes a lot of interesting and often controversial essays about IT, development, startups, etc.

Regarding the NIT as dev environment: yes, the screen is less than ideal, but using a terminal or text editor on my N800 is way more plausible than it would be on an iPhone. I mostly do Java and Ruby development; the N800 doesn't run Java, of course (although I've done development on it via SSH to a server) but it's great for Ruby.

Nonetheless, I do think that the Maemo platform does, in fact, meet Graham's criteria for being exciting to developers; it may be that it just doesn't have quite enough market share (yet) to have the number of apps available take off to iPhone-like levels. Or, of course, that Graham is wrong, but I think he's got a point.