>Apple could have spent less time on their new programming language if they hadn't insisted on reverting every single design decision in Objective-C: the way mutability and constness are handled, NSObject as a root class, naming conventions, the string class, creating their own package manager, etc. There's so much pointless bridging going on.

But every one of these is arguably a good decision. Swift.String has a significantly better interface. immutable types are a huge win. It doesn't make sense to have a root class when you have non-class value types. You have to change the naming conventions if you change the calling syntax, which was a swift goal.

You also can't take LLVM gurus working on a new language and re-task them to take on UI framework feature adds without a lot of friction.

(BTW, my understanding was that NSObject isn't the only root)