Great points, I agree. There is something really fundamentally different about how you work with objects in a message passing system and a statically typed language. I have personally been torn about what to think about the transition from Objective-C to Swift. The former was in the spirit of Alan Kay while Swift clearly moves in the direction of Simula and more modern functional languages.

Sure Objective-C began to show its age but I feel a modern version of Smalltalk build on top of the Objective-C runtime was a missed opportunity.

Although actually I am even more of a LISP fan and the LISP like language Nu built on top of the objective-C runtime was even cooler.