It is link bait, and it's not the first time Slate has done this. Take this as an example:

"Is There Any Truth to the Claim That Einstein Was a Fraud?"

To summarize the article: "no."

Here's an entire article on Slate's link bait tendencies: http://matthewdicks.com/2013/11/benedikt-ridiculous-offensiv...

As for Swift, which Slate compares to Clojure, OCaml, and Scala, one difference is that exactly _none_ of those languages have native support for Cocoa APIs, something you might care a lot about if you're an iOS or OS X developer.

Swift is new, but Slate is not. Total nonsense.

[1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2014/03/18/is_there_any_tru...

I agree completely regarding Slate and their tendency for sensationalist headlines, but I think the author's point regarding Clojure et al is that Apple could have provided native Cocoa APIs for all of those languages, but they chose to develop Swift instead. At that point, IOS or OS X devs could have used any or all of the listed languages that had official APIs.

I suppose time will tell if they made a good choice there, but I tend to think that open source languages will always win over proprietary languages, as they can adapt faster, and get much larger community adoption. It's a pity, because Swift looks pretty nice.