I'm getting more and more confused in regards to C's supersets the further I venture into the programming world. There's just so many versions.. C, C++, C#, Objective-C, Objective-C++ and God knows what else.
I only know tidbits about these languages (some are object-oriented, some are procedural, C was originally developed for UNIX, C++ started as an extension and is used primarily on the Windows OS, Objective-C is primarily used on Linux and Mac OS/iOS, etc), but I'm not even sure that what I know is correct.
I would just like someone to shed some light on what I "know" - a little bit more information about which are successive versions, which platforms each are generally used on, which are the best versions to learn, etc if anyone is feeling generous. :)
Update
Also, I hope to eventually start native (without needs of plugins, such as the .NET framework) application development for Windows and Mac, so can anyone confirm that I would need to learn C++ for Windows and Objective-C for Mac?
C++ started life as "C with classes", in which Bjarne Stroustrup working at AT&T sought to add features like methods and inheritance to C structures in a way that requires as little support from a runtime library as possible. The classes added to "C with classes" are very heavily influenced by the Simula language. It's since grown to include a number of other features, some of the important ones being generics, lambda functions and an expressive standard type library.
Objective-C started life not too dissimilar from its current state, except that it was originally implemented as a C preprocessor. Brad Cox, at his company Stepstone, wanted to combine the power of the Smalltalk object-oriented model with the performance of C native execution. Objective-C uses a dynamic message-passing system to dispatch calls to objects, a design that's directly opposed to C++'s goal of doing everything in the compiler. Thus while objc and c++ start from the same base, the results are very different.
Both of the above language authors also published books explaining the design intention behind their respective languages. Cox's book is long out of print, but both are worth reading if you get the chance. Stroustrup's publications list
Objective-C++ relies on the fact that GCC (or LLVM) can generate code in either language, so the compiler writers allow you to use features from both in the same source file. There are some limits on what's possible at the boundary layer, and Objective-C++ is mainly used either to adapt a C++ library to an Objective-C app or to use STL or Boost data types from C++ inside an Objective-C class.
Finally, languages like C# and Java are not C supersets or C descendants at all. They use C-like syntax to provide some familiarity (and perhaps to avoid having to think about designing a de novo language syntax) but are different beasts that work in a very different way.