It's been interesting and amusing to watch the reactions to Swift, especially among those without much exposure beyond ObjC or JavaScript or similar. Many people encounter difficulties and automatically blame the language, as a sort of reflexive action to blame whatever changed last. Sort of like the classic, "You removed that virus last week, and now the computer's on fire, so this is your fault."

Regarding JSON, it is annoying to work with in Swift, but when you get down to it, it's a fault of JSON in general and the available parsers in particular. There ought to be ways to describe and validate the desired structure to the parser, or failing that, ways to tell the parser to fetch a value of a particular type and nicely produce an error if it doesn't match.

Pretty much as the article says, it's hard to work with JSON correctly in any language, Swift just doesn't let you take the easy way out.

In the ideal language, anything that's hard to write is so because the problem is hard. No language is ideal, but whenever we're working with any new language and something seems harder than it ought to be, we should at least stop and wonder if maybe the "easier" languages we're comparing it to are only easier because they let us do things wrong.