There's been a lot of chatter this week about Swift, Apple's big bomb on the developer community at this week's WWDC. It'll be interesting to see how things play out on the desktop... whether Objective-C give up its title to the new contender. But my speculation is that Swift is eventually going to make a bigger splash on the server.

I see this playing out first in the browser. If Apple open-sources Swift while at the same time incorporating it into Safari, instantly we'll finally have the type of application-level control we've always really wanted on the web. HTML/CSS and it's ilk can finally go back to what it does best... presentation of documents (or how it's currently used in mobile -- mini-documents) rather than attempt to handle navigation and layout (both of which it does poorly).

As people get comfortable with that, then server-side Swift is the natural next step (no pun intended)... in exactly the same way that JavaScript has now taken over the server (for example with Node.js).

Finally then we might start to recover from the many years that HTML has set back computing.