> it already attracts millions of developers because it's the suggested language to develop iOS apps in

Which I pointed out isn't always a good thing. You know how Rails kind of overshadows Ruby because so much use of Ruby is related to rails? Well I think swift will face the same exact fate. I'm not interested in developing iOS frontends or iOS backends in the language. I firmly believe Web will win, and I believe it's going to happen sooner than most people do.

And I firmly believe that Google, Apple, and Microsoft are scared shitless of that idea. Why do you guys think we've seen such a recent renaissance in programming language development and availability? From the years 2000 -> 2010, what did these companies put out? Microsoft had .NET, just as they have since the dawn of time. As far as I can google, it seems that Google put out absolutely nothing. Apple revived Objective-C. Absolutely no progression or innovation whatsoever.

Cut to the last 5 years. Microsoft is dabbling in functional programming in the form of F#...in spite of the fact that their developers are in enterprise and presumably have no interest in this voodoo functional programming. Just in these past few months, they released Visual Studio and .NET on Unix! Meanwhile Apple's making Swift, a language that is simple enough to be used by hipster Apple developers who make iOS apps but also complex enough to have some decent functional elements. Google develops Golang and Dart? They decided to go with Java for android, but now they're interested in spending money developing languages with names on them like Rob Pike and Ken Freakin' Thompson?

Ballmer has been quoted as calling linux "cancer". Now Microsoft is hosting linux VMs for cheap and paying people to develop tools for unix users. When apple launched the iPhone in 2007, they had only 8.1% of the PC market, and yet they opted to risk the success of the iPhone in exchange for maintaining a closed ecosystem and require iOS developers own a mac instead of providing development tools for Windows. Now, when that risk turns out to have paid off and they have a dedicated community of developers, they're suddenly deciding multiplatform support for Swift is important?

Web is winning.

What happens when we can make our apps with ReactJS and cut Google out of their android adsense money because it's just a webview? What happens when we can make our apps with ReactJS and suddenly the iPhone advantage is nil because every app is available on every device and they look exactly the same on every device? What happens when we interact with computers solely through the web and mobile, and Windows continues to lose PC marketshare and maintain their pathetic 2.5% with Windows Phone?

This is embrace, extend, extingush at it's purest. Microsoft wants you developing on their languages using their tools because they know that .NET isn't really licensed under free licenses, and since that means they control where applications run best, they hope they can outperform web and get developers on their platform. It's certainly a stretch, but they're scared.

Apple is operating on the same principle, but theirs is actually permissively licensed. It makes no difference, you can be sure that Swift will be most conveinent for iOS and OSX developers. It's a first class product for Apple devices, but they say they want the community to help them provide support for other devices? Have fun relying on that.

I don't have Google totally figured out. Their goal is probably to bring Golang to android. They're investing in providing a very unified Android experience enhanced strongly by the power of Google Now and their google services, just look at recent android releases. If I can write a backend in golang, host it on google services, and write the client side in go as well, it's a very attractive environment. To be honest, when it comes to Google, I have more faith that they can, sometimes, act altruistically. I don't think Go was an altruistic action, but look at how they give back to open source via GSoC. No one else does anything close. The only big name I think is better than Google is Mozilla.

Speaking of Mozilla, why do you think they're developing Rust and Servo, with lots of experimental rendering techniques? They're betting on web and at being the best at it.

TL;DR: They're giving you new languages and development environments because they are holding on for dear life, and I'm not willing to accept being charmed into closed development environments. The state of tech is a direct result of truly free software that is dictated by the community and the community only. Accept nothing less.