Changes to Swift are hardly indecisive or pointless. A very clear rationale for removing the ++ operator was laid out here: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/master/proposa....
While these changes may be painful now (though the removal of the ++ operator seems minor to me), they should result in a stronger and simpler language in the long run.
Removing x++ is indeed minor, which is why it's so curious. Sure, there are arguments for removing it. But there are also arguments for minimising language churn and just living with these things.
Definitely going against the general language trend, there.
And the justifications to remove ++ are downright bizarre in my opinion.
I think that this kind of break is not that bad, swift is a young language, and there are some things that only after so much testing you realize it could be better.
Swift is 2.5y old, it has just one year being open source, so I don't think these breaking changes as a big deal. It is not in a situation like Python 3. Even the compiler helps you fix it and XCode is very helpful when translating Swift 2 to Swift 3, so it is not that bad.
Of course, age only tells you so much about the amount of work put into the project, and Rust in particular took a huge amount of conceptual work to get its current model of ownership.
Btw, Xcode still doesn't support refactoring Swift code
My girlfriend has decided to learn programming. She started with Swift because she wanted to write iOS apps. The course she's using targets Swift 2 but her install is Swift 3, or something like that (I haven't looked into it much).
XCode constantly flags stuff like x++ being replaced with x += 1. Really? Surely that's the kind of decision you make before version one of a language, not years after release. Why this pointless churn?
If these sorts of totally-indecisive deprecations were rare then you could overlook them, as otherwise Swift is a rather nice language. But they're everywhere. Even in trivial examples intended for beginners line after line of code gets the yellow deprecation warnings. "What does deprecated mean" was literally one of the first questions my girl asked me as she started out learning programming, which is ludicrous. You shouldn't be encountering deprecation warnings over and over when targeting a brand new platform using a teaching course barely a year old.