> you can kind of make your own language within Swift
This is one of my favorite aspects of working with Swift. Because it's a relatively un-opinionated language with a diverse toolkit, and because of the powerful type/protocol system, it can really feel like you can carve out a DSL for each specific use-case.
"Progressive Disclosure" is an interesting idea for PL research, but IME Swift doesn't do a very good job at it. There's a million cases I've seen where people trying to do simple things run into a pandora's box of complexity (e.g., the infamous "Protocol 'P' can only be used as a generic constraint because it has Self or associated type requirements"). There isn't really a "small subset" I've found that's usable for anything but the absolute simplest programs. Even the fundamental types like Int and String have a lot of not-entirely-hidden complexity in Swift.
> Because it's a relatively un-opinionated language
It seems awfully opinionated to me. There is a clear preferred way to write almost anything. Ask online about how to do things differently, and you'll be told to do it in a more "swifty" way.
> because of the powerful type/protocol system, it can really feel like you can carve out a DSL for each specific use-case
I'll have to see if the new features in the latest versions of Swift (used for SwiftUI) enable this more readily, but as of 4.2, anyway, writing DSLs in Swift is moderately limited and painful.
That's a big reason why I don't like it. I also can't stand func, let, and var. Because func and var are totally useless, and let is the wrong word (should be const at least).
There is also all the question marks and other confusing syntax.
Summary
Number of keywords: 310
On the other hand, you can kind of make your own language within Swift because most of the keywords aren't required but allow some additive features. For example, some features help you write your code functionally and others support a declaritive style. It reminds me of what's going on with Babel and JavaScript, where babel extensions are like these language plugins you can mix and match to create your own language.
If you think of metaprogramming as a way to build your own language within a language, lisps and Ruby were kind of like pioneers of a build-your-own-language trend. I could see that as an interesting direction, I wonder if people have tried it before.
[1] https://medium.com/the-traveled-ios-developers-guide/swift-k...