All these rants about XCode/iOS/UIKit/ObjC somehow being a terrible environment to develop for are presuming there is something significantly better out there. There isn't, it seems. You will find developers bitching about literally any development platform out there (except maybe Haskell when you are on HN ;-)
My personal experience is limited to C++/ObjC/Java/Python on Linux/macOS/iOS, and I can only agree that ObjC on Apple platforms is by far the easiest and most productive environment for me. I've only dabbled in Swift a tiny bit so far, but my feeling is that it's also a lot less hostile than C++. In terms of toolkits, Cocoa/UIKit is at least as good as Qt, and much better then e.g. GTK or the abominations you have to deal with if you develop Java applications. Don't know about Windows platforms but considering the endless list of technologies and frameworks that are supposed to supersede whatever came before it, it's likely not much better over there.
All these rants about XCode/iOS/UIKit/ObjC somehow being a terrible environment to develop for are presuming there is something significantly better out there. There isn't, it seems. You will find developers bitching about literally any development platform out there (except maybe Haskell when you are on HN ;-)
My personal experience is limited to C++/ObjC/Java/Python on Linux/macOS/iOS, and I can only agree that ObjC on Apple platforms is by far the easiest and most productive environment for me. I've only dabbled in Swift a tiny bit so far, but my feeling is that it's also a lot less hostile than C++. In terms of toolkits, Cocoa/UIKit is at least as good as Qt, and much better then e.g. GTK or the abominations you have to deal with if you develop Java applications. Don't know about Windows platforms but considering the endless list of technologies and frameworks that are supposed to supersede whatever came before it, it's likely not much better over there.