Truthfully, the language barriers are <i>nothing</i> next to the API barriers dealing with your platform of choice.  I am probably giving away my age here, but there&#x27;s very little that&#x27;s new under the sun after you&#x27;ve tussled with... say one each of the big three language families.  These being: Nasty old C (not going anywhere, ever.  Deal with it.), modern scripting languages (Ruby, Python, et al) and the real deal functional languages (lisp, ml, haskell, etc).  It just turns into &quot;Oh, this is how they handle an array.  Do I have any functional plumbing?  Ok, great.  How do I dispatch a thread? Ok, let&#x27;s go.&quot;  It&#x27;s just not that interesting after a while.<p>Objective-c is quirkier than most, swift is nice but still baking, but it really all boils down to the platform APIs.  And you&#x27;re gonna have to get wet at a platform level if you want to provide functionality beyond a mobile web page.  (Albeit one with improved load times since it&#x27;s coming from disk, at the cost of dynamic updates since it&#x27;s coming from the app store.)