I've decided not to be a native developer, but instead focus only on cross-platform tools. Right now, I've settled on Lua, as I believe its a really powerful,

I've decided not to be a native developer, but instead focus only on cross-platform tools. Right now, I've settled on Lua, as I believe its a really powerful, yet simple technology, that has a lot to offer. Of course, I still need to do some native development - extending the Lua host, and so on - but the meat and beef of my applications is only going to be done in the Lua VM .. its finally delivering on the promise of Java (write once, run anywhere) and is just enough of a challenge to keep things interesting. I have to switch between "Host developer" and "App developer" mode, but I'm finding that context switch to get simpler and simpler as time goes on .. It means the only real native effort that has to be made is just enough to get things working in the Lua side of things, of course - this has its challenges. But, being responsible for the full scope of the framework that supports my app has really made for a more rewarding experience. It has its ups and downs - certainly its not very easy to convince other developers of the merits of this technique - but it definitely results in a sharper, more consistent focus. I feel that the wall-garden effect of other frameworks/environments is no longer an impacting event in my developer chops - I have to understand the native way, but I don't have to use it for the full scope of my implementation. Plus, there is something very satisfying about deploying on multiple platforms with the same code-base.