I'd learn Objective-C if you have any intention of trying to be employed doing iOS. There's going to be a ton of legacy code, and any apps developed from 2008-2014 will have large Objective-C codebases, guaranteed. Swift is designed for interoperability with those codebases, so you'll need to know how to read and understand the legacy code for some time to come, even if Apple eventually deprecates Objective-C in favor of Swift.

If you're doing development for yourself or your own edification, though, you could totally skip Objective-C. It might be worth it to get an overview of the syntax so you can read StackOverflow answers and tutorials about Apple's APIs (which are by far the biggest part of learning iOS dev), but otherwise skipping straight to Swift should be fine.

I think Swift will take a little time to mature. Right now not only is the compiler buggy, Swift introduces some massive new functionality and style which will take time to propagate.

For better or worse, I think Swift is trying to play the same game as Scala—being just enough OO and just enough FP to get everyone on board. I think it's an exciting space (I'm personally quite convinced that OO and FP represent roughly dual things and that there's a happy medium somewhere) but it also means there will be a longish period as "Swift style" is developed and propagated.

So for all of those reasons, I think it's worth sticking with ObjC for a while unless you like a little bit of pain and want to be on the bleeding edge.

I'd say at this point either is fine. Swift is still changing a lot (breaking changes) and the open source ecosystem around it will be lacking for a while. Objective-c is mature with a good ecosystem around it. I've developed in objc for 6 years and learning the basics of Swift was simple for the sole reason that it's the cocoa API's which are important. Once you know them the language is just a different syntax for accessing the same features.

Nope. Swift isn't mature yet.

Swift was designed for beginners and in our experience it delivers. We (http://www.thinkful.com/) recommend Swift for beginners and the students in our Swift classes the last few months agree!

Announcing a $500/month price tag _after_ an email signup dripping with trackers is not so inspiring. Hopefully you teach better design practices in your lessons?

Hm. On the homepage the price is listed as part of the main description of the course. You're not the first to make this point – there's definitely something to it. We'll have to rethink appropriately. Surprises like this in funnels are not a winning strategy.

There is no $500/month price tag. The course is completely free.

OP's site is free. I was answering to the ad for the thinkful.com site posted above - which asks $500/m.