In my own experiments Swift is a fairly "modern" statically typed, functional language with enough ObjC bolted on and mixed in to serve as a suitable replacemen

In my own experiments Swift is a fairly "modern" statically typed, functional language with enough ObjC bolted on and mixed in to serve as a suitable replacement for ObjC. You can do fairly ridiculous things in the functional fragment of Swift [0][1] which match the expressive power of languages like Haskell/ML/Scala. You also gain the standard complement of * Immutability all over * Actually decent type inference * Optional types * Anonymous functions all over * Pattern matching * Real tuples * Real sum types On the OO side you've got powerful generics, classes open to explicit extensions, and protocols (traits, typeclasses, etc) along with a pretty firm commitment to ARC. From my understanding of ObjC there's not a whole lot gained in the OO side of Swift. * Clear reference/value differences * No pointers * No NULL [0] http://tel.github.io/2014/07/27/calkin-wilf-in-swift/ http://tel.github.io/2014/07/27/calkin-wilf-in-swift/ [1] http://tel.github.io/2014/07/30/immutable_enumeration_in_swift/ http://tel.github.io/2014/07/30/immutable_enumeration_in_swi...