Some excellent reminders about empathy, not being a condescending designer, and trying to understand actual people when you build something. It shouldn't be that hard, you're one, and presumably you know some.
Happily, the two co-exist well, and increasingly so. Where one is a better choice for a particular job, you have it. It's just that you now have two tools to choose from.
Hearing one of the core engineers from the LLVM compiler team speak at some length about their aims and approach to Swift, it was cleat that they had reflected long and hard on the approaches of many other languages. This engineer had very informed and nuanced views on the strengths and weaknesses of pretty much any other language you asked about. I'm sure Scala was on this list, also "Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list" — http://www.nondot.org/sabre/
I'm not sure, I've had great fun learning it, and writing it is usually really nice. Sure, there have been pains along the way, but the Apple engineers are doing an amazing job with evolving Swift, intelligently, and very quickly. It is the future, and for many developers I know, it is already part of the present.
Happy memories! Mike Lee's talk was amazing, Laura Savino basically gave a masterclass on presenting, and Maxim Cramer had Twitter on fire. What a wonderful week :)
"Swift is here to stay, but Objective-C is not going to fade away quickly. Many developers have existing codebases, but they also have deadlines, and business decisions. There is no fast way to rewrite an app in Swift. So let’s face it, many of you will probably be writing in Objective-C for a while yet."
"Can we please show people what actually works from Haskell instead of just saying monads and then giggling about it?" — I think the speaker would wholeheartedly agree with you.
In several places, he says that learning and applying functional concepts can be hard, that it takes intellectual work, that is isn't just "magic".
If you're heading out to WWDC, Abizer Nasir is elaborating the talk for AltConf, Wednesday 10th. A good chance to talk this over in person: http://altconf.com/schedule/