[hardwaresofton]

> You're entirely right insofar as (eg) an Android developer will learn iOS far faster than someone without mobile (or any other ui kit) experience. But the specifics are different enough such that it's hard to do both to a high level. Or perhaps I'm just speaking for my own limitations -- I do iOS & Android (native & a bit of react native), but I'm definitely less of an expert with either (or the various server things I also do) than I would be if I specialised.

Yeah, that's definitely true pretty much why projects like react native and flutter exist. I personally have done toy projects on iOS and Android, but do not do it for my day job (and really have no desire to), so I stick to projects like react native and flutter and try to avoid mobile development like the plague.

> I was offering AWS as an example of another platform rather than a language. If you're called on to (for example) implement a bunch of microservice type stuff, there's quite a bit to learn about RDS/dynamo/lambdas/IAM etc, and then all the quite complex deployment stuff to make it truly production ready.

Yeah, absolutely -- funnily enough, I'm relatively sure that AWS wants it this way. AWS can be come so complex so fast, especially when they have many ways to do the same thing (often built upon each other) and it isn't necessarily immediately clear which is the best for your usecase. The additional management they give you for some services is minimal -- I'm thoroaughly convinced that most of the "value" offered by RDS is more-or-less thanks to tools like postgres being well-written/robust software.

I agree on the language being relatively trivial too -- maybe the importance of platforms ties into that -- Once the language difference becomes trivial the next big differentiator must indeed be platforms/the well-used structures that are built on the base language. I'll make sure to express that more clearly in the future

[crispinb]

> I'm relatively sure that AWS wants it this way

Oh yes. Capture is definitely the name of the game. For 'engineers' or 'software developers' to become instead 'iOS/Android/AWS developers' is good business for the corporations concerned (and ultimately, in my opinion, very bad for us).