[pjmlp]

Apple only kept Java around because coming from Pascal and C++ background they were unsure how the Apple developer community would welcome Objective-C.

When they saw the community had no issue embracing Objective-C that is when they dropped the Java bridge, QT for Java and eventually their own JVM.

Chris Lattner never speaks about MacRuby on his interviews, rather how, like clang before it, Swift started as a side project before being shown to upper management.

According to his interviews, many of the Objective-C 2.0 and later improvements were already a kind of slow roadmap into Swift.

[apple4ever]

Yeah, but Objective-C 3.0 would have been a much better path than Swift. It would have allowed easier upgrading to existing code instead of mass rewrites, which always bring their own bugs (and that's ignoring the bugs in Swift itself).