I started programming with C# and after some time i got into the XNA-Framework by Microsoft because i was interested in game-development. This was around one year before microsoft ditched XNA without any good reason (at least they never communicated any reason beside "we wan't to focus on directX").
Seeing XNA getting ditched was a super-frustrating experience, because i put a lot of time and effort into learning how to use it, just to be told by some obviously incompetent idiot working as a manager for microsoft that it was all for nothing because XNA became a dead end. The XNA-Forums dried out pretty quickly after the announcement that XNA would be discontinued. My conclusion of all this was:
As a private person/hobbiest developer i want to avoid using technology owned by some company as much as possible, because that makes me dependent of it.
Thats basically how i came to C++ Programming and especially to SFML. Learning C++ has a much higher learning curve (thus can at times be much more frustrating). However using SFML on the other side was (and still is) always a joy. There's nothing annoying i could ever say about it. The last 2 years i'm using it i never had any concern that SFML might become a dead end. It is really really well designed and its nice to know there are quite some bright minds behind it. Thank you for your effort!
