What about assuming that there is simply no way to ever travel faster than the speed of light (or use a worm hole to achieve the same effect) and thus different civilizations in different star systems are never even able to find each other, let alone visit each other.

Time was, phrases like, "if their entire platform doesn't want to play nice with mainstream standards" were deployed by Microsoft dweebs against UNIX geeks. Did you not notice that iPhone apps are written in Objective C / Cocoa? Swift could just as easily be called, The New Objective C, or Objective C^3, or Objective Cocoa, and none of what you're griping about has changed at all, since the iTunes App Store was first deployed. You don't own a Mac, so you're already not in the iTunes App Store market. Why, again, do you care about this discussion, at all?

Yeah, that definitely shouldn't be overlooked. Apple has a bunch of web-facing apps of their own, implemented in a variety of technologies, including some WebObjects/Java stuff, and some SproutCore/JavaScript stuff. Both of those are essentially clones of portions of (and different generations of) Cocoa (fka NeXTSTEP, which is relevant to recall here, because the WebObjects clone is that old, despite the fact that one of the largest stores on the Internet, iTunes, is built on it).

Here's an interesting political history of WebObjects around the time we last heard from it. As strange as it may seem, there's still an active WebObjects development community despite it being essentially self-supported for nearly a decade, now. Many of the developers in that community were, previously, Objective C developers, and the ones that survived the transition to Java are language agnostics. I suspect they might welcome the opportunity to migrate to a Swift/Cocoa web stack.

It will take some while, but Apple has just made the first step to a "language mindshare" play in the web application space.

I think you should seriously consider using an ad-blocker. In instances like this where a site is both being abusive (showing ads after you've paid to block them) & knowingly wasting a limitied resource (mobile battery & bandwidth), there is no moral quandry. Block them.

Typical, mention a fictional character & get upvoted.

No. Lazy fucker!

Didn't get upset, just love trolling /. Loop: See Loop. CRC fail.

Modded "troll" Heh. Giving mod points to 13 year old children was never going to work. Luckily my Karma is "huge"

Bliss. When I started, you'd write your programme, send it - by sodding post - wait for the punch card operators to type it in. Then you would have to go through all the cards to make sure one had not *become* transposed, then submit & wait for the output. Could take a week. You iPad bods are lucky.........

Comprehension not your strong point then?

You been "polishing" your Bell End?

Your point is?

Stating the bleeding obvious is not making a statement at all.

It merely shows your educational lacking and, frankly, idiocy.

You, on the other hand, have obviously never had a girlfriend.

Reckon you bat for the other side you pooftah.

OP said there are faster & cheaper boards available, which is undeniably true, the article specifically says it's about the community & the provision of support for school children (Kids are the spawn of goats) which makes the Pi a better tool for school children, due to the community support - for teaching programming.

The Arduino may well be cheaper; but the point's moot.

I'm 54 this year. I love playing with my Pi.

But then it's more powerful than the Minicomputers I started on in the late 70's