I disagree. [edit: sorry: not completely?] Decisions are made openly with excellent (if exhaustive) discussion, clear reasoning, and mostly on the merits. Fea

I disagree. [edit: sorry: not completely?] Decisions are made openly with excellent (if exhaustive) discussion, clear reasoning, and mostly on the merits. Features are building on prior features over the years, and when things have needed to be changed or deprecated, they get changed. So the language is alive but not encrusted. Decisions are made much more independently and quickly than Java, which has a similar installed code base and motivated corporate patron. Both small-scope and sweeping architectural changes work through the evolution process pretty quickly. All languages starts with a clean sweet spot but major gaps, and then migrate to common features as they age. Right now, Swift has probably the most mature concurrency plan of all languages, and is beginning to address the lifetime issues presented by value types. No other language blends low-level efficiency and control with high-level type-safety so well - no less seamless inter-op with C/C++, static macros, etc. What's not maturing as fast: third-party libraries ecosystem because most people just need Apple's, Windows support (because - why?), and alternate IDE's, static analysis, etc. As for 217 keywords, etc.: be glad there's a name for everything, without a plethora of ways to do the same thing. If it weren't easier to do complicated things with a correspondingly complicated language, everyone would be writing functional lisp code. The real problem now is there's no real agreement on how to do the function coloring, effects, traits, etc., but that's what's needed to make use of modern hardware. In particular, the type system being bidirectional has made it both pleasant (when it works) and painful (when it doesn't), and stuffing all this new behavior into a type system constraint solver is a bit of a black art. Venn diagrams and verbiage aside, it's just hard for people to think about, e.g., what ~Copyable means for generic parameters, or how a parameter can place a function in a different memory region. But they'll do it after a boatload of discussion, and then make a dumbed-down happy-path 10-minute video for WWDC with code folks can play with - 10 million folks. If anything, the language is strangled by history, but remains attractive because the team does such a good job.