> That matches exactly with my experience being pressed into service writing Rails code for a couple months - the development experience felt like the Stone Age

> That matches exactly with my experience being pressed into service writing Rails code for a couple months - the development experience felt like the Stone Age compared to Swift, even if I could write a method ~20% faster Me, too. At work, I am on two different projects at the moment: an SDK and application written in Swift, and a run-of-the-mill Rails app. Going back to the Rails app is frankly gut-wrenchingly bad. Every aspect of coding and debugging — and especially refactoring — is so much worse when doing it in ruby. The strength of Swift type system makes the tools so much better, and at least for me, it's easier to code in it and reason about it effectively (even if yes, you do type more letters). But, I want to point out: the same is not true of Objective-C. Even though it has a lot of dynamism under the covers, coding in Obj-C in Xcode is much closer to coding in Swift than Ruby. It's only in 'special cases' that you would really use an untyped object reference. So the compiler is able to catch a huge number of errors at compile time, the editor knows what type your variable is so autocomplete is intelligent, etc. I do like Swift better, but coding in Obj-C is much closer to Swift than Ruby in terms of the tooling experience, and in terms of how much dynamic untyped code there actually is in a program. Modern Obj-C is "mostly typed", and swizzling and weird object casting are seldomly done (usually only in a tricky situation, which is when you appreciate the ability).