>There's no doubt in my mind that there will be swarms of people developing with the language, but AFAICT, we'll mostly only see Apple developers working on the language itself.

Well, it's not like there's a "vibrant community" working on Ruby either.

AFAIK, the core developers are Japanese ( http://rubycoreteam.heroku.com/ ) and the core communication and decisions is mostly opaque to outsiders, and new language stuff mostly comes in bunches pre-formed.

As opposed say to Python and the PEPs discussion, PHP etc.