Several questions to consider in deciding: Can you wait 6 months to start? How comfortable are you with functional programming and type theory? How comfortable

Several questions to consider in deciding: Can you wait 6 months to start? How comfortable are you with functional programming and type theory? How comfortable are you with C/C++? How tolerant are you of buggy/constantly crashing software? In 6 months time the answer will be Swift in my view. It is a better language and has nice strongly typed features to help make robust code. However at the moment you have to put up with a buggy implementation and a development environment that is likely to crash every 30 minutes or so taking unsaved edits with it (this is not a complaint it is an Alpha/Beta release and the first release). It does make developing more of a chore. Plus the fact that the language may change itself in the coming months (and in places like the arrays I hope it does). Given all that I suggest waiting and doing something else in the meantime. If you are familiar with C/C++ I would dive in with Obj-C and start getting to know the libraries you will need for your project and you can start adopting Swift when you are ready. If you don't currently program or are used to dynamically/duck typed languages like Ruby and Python I would try some stuff in something like Haskell, ML or another strongly typed language that will get you used to type theory and how to programme in that sort of strongly typed environment within a stable environment. I think that would make it easy to pick up Swift when it is a little more stable. If you already have a good background in functional programming but not so much in C/C++ it might be worth braving the instability to use Swift to learn the Cocoa touch libraries and explore. The Playgrounds are very cool but VERY unstable at the moment, maybe there will be a better release tomorrow.