To me, it's easy to see what needs to be done with objective-c when you write a tiny class that creates a dictionary:

    @interface MyClass
    - (NSDictionary *)createSimpleDictionary;
    @end

    @implementation MyClass
    - (NSDictionary *)createSimpleDictionary
    {
        return @{
           @"keyForNumber": @1,
           @"keyForBool": @YES,
           @"keyForArrayOfStrings: @[@"one", @"two", @"three"]
        };
    }
    @end

How much cleaner could this be if we dropped C backwards compatibility! We could remove the header file, and get rid of all the *'s and @'s:

    class MyClass
    - (NSDictionary)createSimpleDictionary
    {
        return {
           "keyForNumber": 1,
           "keyForBool": YES,
           "keyForArrayOfStrings: ["one", "two", "three"]
        }
    }
    end

This new language would get rid of many warts of Objective-C, bringing it up to speed with modern languages, while keeping performance and interoperability with the Cocoa toolchain.

There may be some perfect, completely new idea for a programming language out there, but Apple would never go for it. Developer experience is a distant third to the User experience and the Apple experience, and the only thing they will go for is an evolutionary, backward compatibile change such as this.