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Comment by rimliu | Hacker News Reader

  > Most web developers are comfortable in many languages.

Citation needed. Especially the "most" part. I've been web developer for 10 years when iPhone came out. I liked what I saw, so when SDK came out I've learned Objective-C. Then I learned Swift. And because I know both sides all this feature parity talk really makes me sad about ignorant people not even willing to learn.

"Walled-garden" has long ago became thought-stopping cliche. But if it is walled garden, then I am thankful that Apple does not allow to litter it with some JS scraps. All this cross-platform talk is just being cheap, being lazy or both. It save money, but it produces the lowest common denominator UX wise. And I would not be surprised that maintaining cross-platform monstrosity eats away any cost-savings pretty quickly.

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You know that the need for citation goes both ways and anecdotal evidence isn't a real reference, right? Web developers know at least JS, HTML & CSS. Too many know Ruby, Python and/or PHP. Significant amount of them know C#/Java/Go or something similar. Then there is Typescript, all those compile-to-js languages and so on. I've never ever seen a web developer who could only program in JS. That would be very ridiculous. I personally can't count how many languages I worked and had to work with. My list includes ColdFusion. I'm very comfortable with at least 5 languages and 6 platforms.

> I am thankful that Apple does not allow to litter it with some JS scraps.

Oh, so much for being objective. References and all.

> All this cross-platform talk is just being cheap, being lazy or both.

Are you even serious? You really blame engineers/developers coming up with trade-offs for being cheap and/or lazy?

> And I would not be surprised that maintaining cross-platform monstrosity eats away any cost-savings pretty quickly.

No it doesn't. I'm a developer since much more than 10 years. I guess that's enough of a reference :)

I'd also add SQL to your language list, and often SASS, gulp/grunt configuration, JSON, ASP.NET, and so on.

And come on, JS is a C-style language. If you know one you know them all.

It's also not a difficult jump to OOP languages; especially now that Java 8 supported lambdas and C# supports async/await. It's hard to learn concepts, not syntax.

Don't you agree, though, thinking that web developers don't write iOS apps because they don't want to learn Swift, is a bit ridiculous at this point? Yet another language isn't even significant for a typical web developer. For me, tooling (XCode) took more time to learn than being able to write acceptable Swift...

Yes, I agree. I was agreeing with you before as well. Setting up a Mac, learning a new IDE, and getting your tooling/builds set up is a far bigger pain point than actually learning the new language.

At least that's the case if it's logically similar. C, Java, JS, etc are mostly transferable. I might not say the same about something like Haskell.

If that's the case, then we shouldn't hear any complaining about having to learn Java, ObjC or Swift.

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