The hate Objective-C has received for its syntax is unreal. It’s a minimalistic, easy-to-navigate language, but people assumed Swift would be easier just because it looks more like Java and C#.
Meanwhile, Swift is such a mess that even its own creator said the following in an interview:
“Swift, the original idea was factor complexity (…) massively failed, in my opinion (…) Swift has turned into a gigantic, super complicated bag of special cases, special syntax, special stuff”
Well arguably he stated the whole thing since Chris wanted it to be one language to rule them all from assembly to javascript. It was that moment I knew Swift is wrong from birth.
Now 10 years later, Apple is stuck with hundreds of engineers trying to improve the language, rewrite some of the API in Swift. And Apps as well. All with very little user benefits. This actually reminds me of Apple without Steve Jobs era.
Imagine if Apple had simply said we are going to use Objective-C for another 10 years on a wait and see approach. I think the decline in Apple's quality is simply because when Apple has too many resources, different teams are all trying to get resources and put something out for credit in Resume Driven development.
Swift should have been an alternative syntax targetting the same Obj-C runtime IMO.
I lost hope for Swift after seeing a minor holy war about the c-style for loop.