Alex: It's all about trade-offs. I don't consider the complexity and limitations of type-safety are a good trade off to prevent a small class of bugs that are uncommon, easily found and easily fixed. It's all about a measured response and I feel like it's unbalanced in this case.

My concern is, because I've seen it before, is pursuit of safety over all other things. For some, it becomes a mantra without any notion of whether it has a big enough effect in reality. Type-safety is only small kind of safety and in the bigger scheme of things, it really isn't all that. If I were to prioritize the problems I need to solve, it would not be in there.

Yes, shipping faster is great but type safety goes against that. My experience is that it makes you less agile. That's the price you pay for things being more tightly bound.

And I'm not saying Swift isn't bringing any improvements. There are a lot of great things about it. But it has fundamental issues that need to be addressed and instead of good answers I'm seeing a lot of dismissal and denial from certain segments, which is really unfortunate. I suggest checking out Brent Simmon's series of posts and seeing the types of responses he gets for legitimate and earnestly asked questions.