1. You don't have to use it all, but someone will. And there are over 200 keywords in the language: https://x.com/jacobtechtavern/status/1841251621004538183

2. On top of that many of the features in the language exist not because they were carefully designed, but because they were rushed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47529006

Lattner probably left because Apple didn't give the team any breathing room to properly implement the language. It was "we must have this feature yesterday". A lot of Swift is the equivalent of Javascrip's "we have 10 days to implement and ship it":

https://youtu.be/ovYbgbrQ-v8?si=tAko6n88PmpWrzvO&t=1400

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Swift has turned into a gigantic super complicated bag of special cases, special syntax, special stuff...

We had a ton of users, it had a ton of iternal technical debt... the whole team was behind, and instead of fixing the core, what the team did is they started adding all these special cases.

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In article we discuss has a link to this article: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/icons-in-menus/ Which has a good paragraph with an example:

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Get a bunch of people in a room, show them menus where the textual labels are gone, and see who can get the most right.

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Icons won't help you when they are inconsistent, or don't mean anything.

It's impossible to find a suitable visual metaphor for every possible action of every possible app and cram it into a tiny monochrome icon.

Why would they backtrack? Alan Dye wasn't the only person at Apple pushing this with God-like powers overriding everyone's decisions. [1]

New head of design, surprise surprise: Apple's new software design chief, Steve Lemay, was "a driving force" behind Liquid Glass and was "deeply involved in its development." https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/15/ios-27-macos-27-no-majo...

[1] I have small rant about this pervasive view here: https://dmitriid.com/the-curious-case-of-alan-dye