Swift

It's really easy to be cynical about Swift, Apple's new programming language -- that it is yet another vendor-specific programming language that does nothing but create more lock-in for iOS and OS X developers... While this is true, I have to admit being rather excited about it: the language looks really interesting and approachable for programmers familiar with other modern object-oriented languages.

They do seem to have created quite the win-win-win: Apple has a technology that is unique to them (porting applications to Android remains hard), existing iOS/OS X developers get a nice productivity step up, and new developers get to enter this world via a modern language that sheds most of the quirks of Objective C. Impressive!