Criss Latner made a huge disservice to the iOS community. While the intentions were good (build a modern language), it completely failed to the 'it is easy and fun to use'.

Had a golden chance to build a next generation language that could have been the next modern Java or Python, used everywhere, but instead we got the iOS version of 'Scala', a language that is just over-complicated for no reason at all.

If you took the Objective-C, modernized the syntax (which is the biggest turn off for many), and add few of the modern utilities that is missing in string/array manipulation, you would have had a much better language that what Swift has become.

As in many cases, the sequel is often worse than the original.

If I was in charge of the Swift development, i'd consider a complete re-thinking of the language, and just remove the unnecessary complexity that is in every step of the language that make it not fun and not productive to use.