The official docs state that Swift is a "great first language". They also claim:
Swift can open doors to the world of coding. In fact, it was designed to be anyone’s first programming language...
The doc also promotes Swift Playgrounds and a free curriculum for teaching kids.
This is all charming, and I really want to buy into it. I love Swift, we homeschool and my son wants to learn coding. It'd be cool if I could teach him my favorite language.
However, being frank about my own experience, I found Swift large and complicated. It does reward the commitment, but still requires a lot of time to learn. Swift 6 adds strict concurrency checking (albeit temporarily opt-in) which raises the bar even further.
I'm happy to confess I was a script wizard when I started with Swift. I had about twelve years experience, but the majority of it was with dynamically typed, interpreted languages, so I had a lot to learn. Still, we're talking about kids using Swift as their first programming language.
Is Swift 6 still a good language for kids to learn programming with?