[acjohnson55]

It's not a modern language, so appreciating it has to be in its original context. I think it does an admirable job of augmenting C with object-oriented capabilities. It's certainly easier to master than C++.

I'm not an expert on this, but I suspect that the main reasons it was chosen for iOS were:

- The technical limitations of the original iPhone meant that you needed to use a low-level language.

- The legacy of NeXT at Apple.

[saagarjha]

Mostly the latter, I would assume. Apple didn't really use anything other than Objective-C for its application frameworks (and still generally does not, for the most part).

[pjmlp]

I read in multiple sources, usually the kind of comments that is only possible to validate with inside info, that to this day not all business units are sold on Swift.

[saagarjha]

Sold or not, it's easy to see that most of the code being written is still in Objective-C just by looking at the code that Apple ships publicly.