On Sun, Dec 10, 2017 at 1:06 AM, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

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.

If by "too far off the ground" you mean too high a level of abstraction, that implies some compromise like poor look and feel or poor performance. The Flutter dev team considers anything less than native look and feel and native performance a bug. Flutter apps can achieve the same frame rates as apps written in Swift or Kotlin because of the approach they have taken to abstraction. While other cross-platform frameworks rely on a JavaScript to native bridge, which causes a big performance hit every time that bridge has to be crossed, Flutter does not. This article provides a good overview of what makes Flutter interesting and how Flutter abstracts the underlying platform. <https://hackernoon.com/whats-revolutionary-about-flutter-946915b09514> The links to other sites in the first paragraph are worth reading, too.

William, I highly recommend you read up on Dart and Flutter before committing to Swift and Kotlin. Dart is pretty easy to learn for anyone with experience in curly brace languages. Here is a quick overview video of Flutter you may find useful. <https://youtu.be/sLY-vgE-mq0> I've been keeping an eye on Flutter's gitter channel <https://gitter.im/flutter/flutter> and I notice that it's quite active and the people there are helpful to and welcoming of newbies. That's key to adoption.