I understand that but it's only been available to the public for a few months. Apple were likely focussed completely on getting it ready for dev to use in iOS 8. That's where all their man power was. Give them some time.
It's been 33 days since iOS 8 came out. It takes 30 seconds to tweet "Hey, we have some cleaning up to do before we open up Swift, but it's coming some time in the next two years!" They have not even expressed an interest in open-sourcing it. Any thought of Apple open-sourcing Swift at this point is pure fantasy, so the suggestion that we "give them some time" doesn't make any sense to me.
They have expressed interest in open-sourcing Swift pretty much immediately after announcing it. Both on Twitter and later (?) on the LLVM mailing list. No official Apple announcement and far from a guarantee that it will happen - but "they have not even expressed an interest" isn't true.
Not unless you've seen something I haven't. Chris Lattner said that although he was personally interested in open-sourcing it, Apple had no intention of ever doing so at that time. To my knowledge, that is the last we ever heard of it
Maybe I'm crazy/misremembering. But other than the "we're focussed on polishing it first" I thought I also read something reaffirming an interest (not from Apple officially but from one of the devs) to open source. And the LLVM mailing list post also contains a pretty clear "a lot of us really want to open source this" statement. Maybe this is just a misunderstanding: I didn't mean to imply that Apple expressed "an interest" as in "officially announced an interest". That would be very un-Apple-like. They tend to either do or don't. What I meant is that voices out of the project said they'd like to open-source. Which at that level (compiler/low-level) seems to suggest that it's likely. Given Apple's track record in that area / on that level.
It might take only 30 sec to tweet about it, but with open-sourcing comes a lot of stuff to deal with: once it goes open, there will be forks and pull requests and what not. Apple probably isn't yet ready to do fully open development (like they do with LLVM) of Swift.
Did you not actually read the comment you replied to? The entire point was that they haven't even said "We intend to open-source Swift once we're ready." The last we heard, they hadn't even considered open-sourcing it, like, ever.
(To clarify for people who like to misread things, I did not just say "They expressly intend to never open-source it." I said that, last we heard, they had not even talked about ever open-sourcing it.)
Why should they waste 30 seconds on that? To satisfy you? Very few people really care about this. If they say anything and then it takes longer to deliver than they thought those people will jump down their throat. Better to say nothing and announce when ready.
"When it's completely finished" is essentially synonymous with "when it's dead."