"It’s the syntactic sugar that makes the syntax modern, not the feature set within Swift itself. A cleaner ObjC could have done the same thing."
I think this statement is false—a cleaner Objective-C could be nowhere near as clean as Swift!
I think this statement is false—a cleaner Objective-C could be nowhere near as clean as Swift!
In other words, we could have gotten almost-Swift by building squarely on ObjC and would have avoided most of the runtime and performance issues that still plague the language. Plus it would have been a simpler language than Swift is.
And now you have room in your language to provide actual innovation. See http:/objective.st/ for a start of what that might look like.