[timburks]

Along with the ARC transition, the move from PowerPC to Intel was incredibly smooth (relatively). But much of the work for that was done long before the change actually happened.

Both of those changes required very little from developers. Obviously a new language is going to take much more. The biggest challenge with Swift is keeping the programming interface simple. While it gets rid of the @ signs that people stumble over in Objective-C, Swift didn't really reduce the amount of learning required to create a program. Rather, it seems to be everyone's new favorite place to talk about exotic programming concepts, which results in terrifying blog posts like this one: https://developer.ibm.com/swift/2016/01/27/seven-swift-snare...

I wonder how long it will be before someone like Douglas Crockford shows up with Swift: The Good Parts.

[Grustaf]

I think the major advantage for new developers isn't the level of conceptual complexity but much clearer and cleaner syntax, which also happens to be more inline with most other modern popular languages. That's a major advantage.