As someone wise mentioned to me, Objective-c was 20% of the problem and Apple's silly rules and controls around app distribution are the other 80%. As someone who had their app available in the app store for nearly 8 months including 3 approved updates before being (seemingly) arbitrarily rejected, I feel the pain of that other 80%.

How else are they supposed to announce it? It's simply that, an announcement. People are talking about it now and there's info on the Apple site. I see this as a huge push forward for new developers.

The announcement was fine, it is the "its working" part that is odd considering it is less than a day old. Let's see if it actually attracts new developers before we declare it a mighty success.

Well; based on the promise of immediate inclusion in the app store and a very well thought out book about the language available for free I'd say they're doing rather well so far already.

You mentioned things that are likely to bring about the desired result of creating new ios developers. I am not disagreeing about the likelihood of success. I am simply saying that T + 8h is probably too soon to conclude that the program is successfully creating new ios developers. To be honest I think it is absurd to expect that such a program from any company could bring about the desired goal of creating new developers in less than eight hours.