If you put it that way, then yes. You could even use assembly to do both things. Or even CPU microcode.

What they mean is that the language works at high enough abstraction and feels appropriate for writing both kinds of apps.

I wouldn't want to do a social media app with Fortran, even if it's perfectly possible.

C++ would be absolutely terrible for social media applications. There, the barrier isn't usually the speed but correctness and maintenance overhead.

Is Objective C really that much better? If you have decent APIs/libraries, C++ would be just fine.

As an example, OKCupid uses C++ and runs on a custom webserver.

http://www.okcupid.com/about/technology

I don't understand. Why would you make everything in-house especially for site like Ok-Cupid which is not exactly used to power rocket engines.

They were in much the same boat as I was back then: whatever you could install out of the box was simply too slow. Inefficiency would have caused us to die on hosting costs so we had to build our own webserver and so on. It's gotten a lot easier over the last decade and a half to build a performant website.

If Ok-Cupid were started today I highly doubt they would do that the same way. But given when they did start it I figure they literally did not have a choice.

They did a blog post on it that I can't find right now. Essentially, they made it quite a while ago (2002? I don't recall exactly), and all other options were too slow. Their backend apparently has to do a lot of work calculating match scores when users search.

Found a post by one of the developers describing the decision in some detail: http://www.brightjourney.com/q/okcupid-write-web-server

They've also open sourced their server: https://github.com/okws/okws

Objective C is head and shoulders better to program in than C++.

It's still got the same C warts that C++ does in a lot of place, but it is far simpler and less leaky than C++.

C++ is still faster and more cross platform, than objective-c

  --Have done both professionally

C++ can be just fine. It can also be used to write software bad enough to quit over, that dozens of people will maintain for decades. And they talk about it. I don't think Objective C has that problem.

To be fair, Objective C hasn't run billion dollar companies for decades yet either (in mass).

Objective-C up until the last couple years was powering the payments infrastructure for the Apple Online Store.

Which isn't exposing Objective-C to a wide range of engineers in the industry to the point people and relate and swap horror stories about it.

Yes, that is my point but I didn't make it very well. If Objective C were routinely subjected to these sorts of projects, I think its over-all reputation would be a lot worse.

No, objC isn't better. While it is fine for UI stuff, I wouldn't really want I build a web app with it. What I've read of Swift is more interesting.

Funny NeXT thought otherwise. WebObjects was a very good server platform.

No, but according to Chris Lattner, Swift is.

And Swift would be equally terrible for a high performance 3D game. (It's not because the guy from Apple said it that it's true.)

There's a reason why every single AAA studio uses C++ for their engines and titles. And that's the same reason why it is terrible for social media applications.

Every single AAA studio uses C++ to write the smallest portion of their game they can in C++.

Then they put a sane, modern language on top of it many places, Actionscript at EA, Python at many other places, LUA at others, C# at others, and write in a high level language that doesn't leak abstractions like a nut milk bag.

Mostly because game studios don't write compilers so they get to use what the respective OS vendors SDKs offer.