Eh, not any more. JWZ is a has-been, who admittedly did good things back in the 90's, but who has lost touch with the industry when he became a hobby coder. This post is a clear demonstration of that - if he knew even a little bit what he was talking about, he wouldn't make the outrageous claims he does. But no, he just want to hang on to his toys he wrote 15 years ago and have them work with just a recompile on platforms that don't even remotely resemble the platforms he wrote them for back then. That's just absurd. And yes, I too complain (loudly) when I have to change code to accommodate changes in the platform (like how VS12 doesn't support WinXP) but in the end, deep down, I recognize that that's just how it has to go, and so should somebody who knows (or should know) much better than me, like JWZ.
Its not absurd at all. He's got a massive collection of amazing GL-based screensavers that a LOT of people have learned graphics programming from, over the years. There are still contributions being made to this collection in 2012, and there have been consistent additions to the collection since the very early 90's. This is no toy collection.
Fact is a lot of great OpenGL code could run on the iPad today, if only the false ideology of cutting 'archaic things' out of the ES profiles wasn't getting in the way. There are plenty of opportunities for OpenGL apps from decades ago to be re-targetted to the new platforms, if only for this problem - and jwz is right to point it out.
Anyone learning OpenGL from code as young as 5 years old (i.e., all fixed-pipeline code) is getting shafted because what they learn is so out of touch with the state of the art in graphics technology. Just like for the Nehe tutorials that whole generations have been brought up on. That's the whole point here, 3d graphics has moved on, and everybody working in it should, too; of course, as with anything, there are always grumpy greybeards who feel that their way of doing things is Good Enough For Them, and therefore should be supported indefinitely.
The arguments on why fixed-pipeline OpenGL should be deprecated have been re-hashed several times convincingly in this thread, I don't have to repeat them here. I don't quite see why the state of the art in graphics should be held back because some people want to see spinning teapots on their iPads without having to learn something new. You seem to be implying that programs written in the past can't be made to work on new platforms; while it's true that it would need changes to the code, please show me the decades-old program in Objective C or Java you mention that you'd like to see working on your iPad without having to change the code.
I hadn't heard of it, but a quick google shows that it's (or rather, was) a closed-source 3d modeler that was discontinued in the late 1990's. That is another situation than the one under discussion; API backwards compatibility doesn't even apply to that product, that product would require a way to run native-code binaries, written for (presumably) Windows (or otherwise, some Unixes), unmodified on the iPad.
The point of my last sentence was that it's impossible, because that long ago Java, iPads, Cocoa etc. didn't even exist. For somebody who wants to port a C++ codebase from those days to a mobile platform, having to re-do the 3d rendering (which is only a very small part of any well-engineered large application anyway) in a programmable pipeline is the least of his worries.
