[GTALUG] Learn Swift for Apple/iOS. Learn ??? for Google/Android.

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: ted leslie via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| bitch about it? C is complete crap that's why, except for legacy work, or
| forced to deal with a env. with old compiler support only, why would anyone
| in there right mind use C?
| c++14/17/20 rules the day (even C++11 is great, but given where we are now
| in time c++14/17 rocks), C++ is a super-set of C (in practice).

C is old and could be improved in a hundred ways.  Unfortunately C++
has improved it in a thousand ways.

The proper aesthetic of computer science is elegant simplicity.  C++
misses by a parsec.

I'm sure that there are an enormous number of subsets of C++ which are
wonderful.  But you get no help find such a subset or catching
excursions from it.

Are you perhaps using a Microsoft platform?  C itself has advanced but
Microsoft does not support modern C.  C changes are almost all
borrowed from C++.  Some are ill-considered but some are quite
pleasant.

|  Golang was dev'd apparently to
| give C++ programmers a better place, they didn't come, but c++11/14/17/20
| rocks and makes golang a complete fail,
| but when golang was developed/invented C++ was in its pre- c++11 very sad
| state.

I don't think that that is a fair characterization of the Go project.

I haven't used Go but I think that I got the gist of it: simplicity
was a strong goal.  So was safety.  They solved some problems and
avoided others.

C++ designers never saw a problem that they couldn't solve.  But the
better design principal is to avoid problems.

I spend most of my programming time in C.  The next language I intend
to use is Rust.  I like its ideas but proof of the pudding is in the
eating.  The cases where I would recommend C for new projects are few
and far between.

C is just not very good at using APIs designed for other languages.
The APIs I use are designed for C. That explains why I'm OK living in
C.

The "grain" of iOS seems to favour Swift (at least in the future).
The grain of Android favours Java.  Clifford's quick survey of systems
for writing for both both platforms at once seems the most useful
contribution.  But I suspect that it is too far off the ground for
William.

One advantage of C: it is darn stable.  New languages tend to have a
lot of churn. Improvements can be headaches if you have a large
codebase.  The Python 2 / Python 3 thing looks really painful.