I really don't get why you can bring up languages such as Rust and Go, and complain about Apple's special snowflake approach. Suddenly Apple is doing something developers have been demanding from them for years and something lots of other companies like Google, Mozila and Microsoft has already done. But oh no, because it is Apple, it is all wrong.
The Java/Objective-C bridge existed in the early days as they weren't sure if developers would pick Objective-C, so they decided to bet on two horses.
As Objective-C eventually won the hearts of Mac OS X developers, the bridge was deprecated and a few years later the full Java support.
And yet they've decided to do it again, with yet another incompatible language! Joy of joys!
(And as for Java, it was my understanding that Apple had hobbled it by refusing to release updates on a timely basis.)
I can see how they could get tired of being forced to ship almost-monthly updates just to support an extra language with very limited adoption. If you have to make that sort of effort, you'll probably do it for your native tools only (like Microsoft does with .Net). Besides, Java apps on OSX looked better than Java apps on Windows, but they were still recognizably different from Obj-C ones.
I wish somebody would write an OS in Python 3...
That's a different, later issue.
Early on in the life of OS X, Apple offered a Java interface to the Cocoa class frameworks. In theory, you could write OS X applications using Java, calling into the Apple frameworks instead of using Swing or whatever Java frameworks.
This wasn't all that well supported, didn't perform well, and wasn't popular.
Frankly, a bit of a clean up every decade or two is not exactly often, right?
At least Microsoft and Google show off their new projects and code so everyone can learn from them and read their research.
Hint: one of these things is not like the other...see if you can figure out which using only the power of curl.
I've been amazed recently how many open-source projects that we rolled into our linux product were Apple sourced: LLVM, Clang, libdispatch, webkit, OpenCL, zeroConf. Can't think of anything google has done for me recently.
And if there is anyone who will knock-this out of the park, its Chris Lattner. LLVM, Clang, and openCL is all him. He has done more for compiler tech than anyone in 30 years.
If you think Java is remotely comparable in power and expressiveness to Objective C, you should probably reconsider your line of work.
The rise in popularity of Java nearly drove me from the industry it is such a verbose half baked pile of garbage. I could fill your browser with things you can do in Objective C that you cannot do in Java at all and this incredible flexibility is why Apple is such an agile company with such limited head count.
I dislike that Apple has continued the special snowflake approach, that for some reason we as developers need to learn yet another different-but-almost-the-same language to develop for them, instead of just adding proper support and documentation for an existing language. Why not just let us use ES6, or normal C/C++, or Java?
But instead, now there's yet another language without great innovation that is probably going to be badly supported outside of the Apple ecosystem but still will have enough fandom to keep it alive and make life annoying.
At least Google had the decency to pick a language everybody was already using and use that.
EDIT:
I feel bad for all the engineers stuck in those pixel mines, not allowed to talk about what they're doing, doomed to reinvent things that are on the way out just as they come in.