Mobile may be the future, but Swift is limited to one vendors mobile platform, while there are a ton of languages (C#, JS, Python, Ruby, even Haskell) that you can use for mobile that aren't limited to one vendor''s platform. Plus, "mobile" usually has a server component, and those other languages can also be used for the server end.

Where can you run python on Mobile? Also, yes of course it's one vendor. One vendor that also has the world's most profitable app store. OP asked for a language to get started with. In my personal experience, being able to see items move on screen is a lot more intriguing to beginners than doing some server specific tasks like building an API.

That assumes he has a Mac. Many people do not. I could say the same thing about Java and Android, and that dev environment at least runs on all platforms.

Swift is a poor choice because of it's instability (in terms of changes to syntax), and because you really need to be able to read Objective-C to work with the platform.

Swift will not teach you the fundamentals of programming

I think Swift is a better ground for the fundamentals of programming than many others... but there are many other reasons to not choose such a young language.

http://tel.github.io/2014/07/26/types_of_data_in_swift/