Excellent points. Additionally: "cutting edge" OS upgrades often come at a price which is not only monetary. People with older hardware don't usually want to pay the performance penalty which may result from upgrades.

"Obscure" languages often are extremely useful for some applications. As an example, "awk" is a serious power-tool for dealing with tabular data. My own "8th" (8th-dev.com) is a new, and currently still obscure language, but learning it will give you the ability to write cross-platform applications with the same source code. If that's not useful to you, then you wouldn't be interested. But if it was, spending some hours to check it out may pay off big.

You get the highest performance app if you build directly using ObjC for iOS. But your application is then not portable; if you don't care, fine. If you do care, you have to look at the alternatives, which vary in more than just price-point. Consider performance vs cost of development and QA and maintenance (for multiple platforms) vs price of development tools vs. flexibility of the tools vs. low-level hardware access. Among other variables one could name. Our offering in this getting-to-be-crowded field is '8th' (8th-dev.com). The apps it produces are faster than Corona/PhoneGap, and (in our opinion) easier to code than Xamarin et. al. Not to mention that we are less expensive than our serious competition.

Linus was most definitely correct. I've been using C++ for decades; most of the time in most of the places I've worked, as a nicer version of C. Some of the places decided to go "template crazy" and ended up with unmaintainable code (and extremely difficult to debug as well). The very worst part of C++ is that missing something arcane (like forgetting to put "virtual" on a destructor) can lead to hours and hours of debugging fun. There shouldn't even *be* an option to forget something that screws you over like that.

As if there aren't enough things to take into consideration regarding security and exploits. Now we have to worry about faulty hardware design as well. Yikes!

Good point. Because I've recently had a number of people say they would "definitely" use my product if I developed it. Of course as you say, talk is cheap.

"8th" is a cross-platform development language, you can find out more at the site 8th-dev.com - sorry about the lack of Googleability of the name...

... a secure notepad which syncs between devices. Because you can't rely on Google or Microsoft when it comes to your data's security. But two different business consultants persuaded me to write 8th instead (which I was going to do in any event, to get to the secure notepad). Now I'm seriously weighing whether or not to take up the secure notepad project again