I think a lot of the blame for the backlash in the iOS community over Swift should be laid squarely at Apple's feet. At WWDC they pitched it as production-ready but the truth is that even today it is seriously unfinished. It doesn't even support incremental compilation and the tooling is still very fragile. I'd strongly recommend anybody new to iOS to start with ObjC for now. You need to at least be able to read ObjC to understand the APIs and all of the sample code out there and it's still overall a more productive environment.
I don't think any of Swift's current problems are unfixable but I'd give it another year or so at least to mature.
I don't think any of Swift's current problems are unfixable but I'd give it another year or so at least to mature.