Agreed, but there's a higher baseline mental overhead due to increased complexity of Swift that Objective-C doesn't have, at least once you get past the weird square bracket syntax. This is mental overhead that distracts from the actual problem needing to be solved.
Swift isn't alone in this respect. I think TypeScript is another example of a language which started out claiming to offer a better experience than Javascript only to become very complex. I'm sure that this added complexity helps some programmers some of the time. But just like CISC was a dead end and all computer chips are essentially RISC-based today, I suspect the pendulum may have swung too far in terms of adding features to some of these developer-friendly languages.
But, it's a contrarian view for a reason. I'm just somebody who fell in love with the simplicity of Objective-C almost 20 years ago, before the iPhone was a thing. So I may be looking back at things with rose tinted glasses.
I couldn’t quite get behind the initial assertion but I agree with this one, that Swift results in more complicated, clever code. Objective-C though had more convoluted, “unsafe” code (think swizzling and nil checks). I think in the end Swift requires less unit testing and is (usually) easier to read and make assumptions which increases velocity, doubly so if you can avoid being fancy (looking at you Generics).
Swift isn't alone in this respect. I think TypeScript is another example of a language which started out claiming to offer a better experience than Javascript only to become very complex. I'm sure that this added complexity helps some programmers some of the time. But just like CISC was a dead end and all computer chips are essentially RISC-based today, I suspect the pendulum may have swung too far in terms of adding features to some of these developer-friendly languages.
But, it's a contrarian view for a reason. I'm just somebody who fell in love with the simplicity of Objective-C almost 20 years ago, before the iPhone was a thing. So I may be looking back at things with rose tinted glasses.