Apple just announced a new language called Swift. I took a look at the language manual, here is a quick overview:

• Statically typed with type inference.
• Generics.
• Closures.
• No exceptions.
• Extension methods.
• Properties (syntax similar to C#), including lazy properties with the "@lazy" annotation.
• Functions, methods and type (static) methods.
• Support for observers (with "willSet" and "didSet"). Interesting to see the observer pattern baked in a language although I’m more partial to event buses for this kind of thing.
• Enums.
• Classes and structures (structures have restrictions regarding inheritance and other things).
• For and while loops (statements, not expressions).
• "mutating" keyword.
• Named parameters.
• Deinitializers (finalizers).
• Protocols (interfaces).
• Optional chaining with "a?.b?.c" and forced dereference with "!."“.
• Convenient “assign and test”: "if let person = findPerson() ...".
• Type casting with "is", down casting with "as?" (combines nicely with the "let" syntax. Ceylon does it right too). Very interesting overall, and a clear step up from Objective C. From the feature set, I would say the language that Swift has the most overlap with is Kotlin, which is great news for Apple developers.

Update:discussion on reddit.