[rev087]

Apple is a big, rich corporation. But in that campus there are still human developers.

Radical hypothesis: what if this started as a pet project, got the attention of more employees, then management (with or without convincing from said developers). Management sees the value in the project, and funds it officially. You know, like other big, rich corporations...such as Google.

[toyg]

When the project lead is one of the creators of LLVM (arguably the most fundamental low-level project in Apple after actual kernels), this sort of scenario is improbable.

Much more probable is that somebody asked top-developer Lattner for "a simpler language to compete with Java/Dalvik and C# with more casual developers" and he came up with Swift. The name itself is a message: "this thing is quick - quick to learn and quick to run, unlike VM-based stuff that must translate to Obj-C (fast to learn, slow to run) or Obj-C itself (fast to run, slow to learn)".