It is true. Apple designed Swift for people learning their first programming language, which [correctly, IMO] implies people who know very little about programming both from a syntax and theory standpoint.

People learning their first programming language are typically "kids who are not yet programmers and do not yet have solid understandings of programming logic."

High School and College Students (even in CS majors) very often have 0 experience developing software, and many of them have never seen "Hello World" before. This is the real world.

There are languages out there that are already a lot more suitable for teaching beginners than Swift, which are fully OO and Multi-Paradigm, but a lot easier to read and digest; like Visual Basic and Delphi/Object Pascal.

Of course, if you want to develop on Apple's platforms, Swift is the way to go (because Objective-C is horrible and we know where they will be putting most of their effort moving forwards i.e. in their developers tools, etc.) so the language isn't going to just die off. However, making it open source is not much different than Microsoft Standardizing C#, IMO.

People will pay a little more attention to it because "Apple," but I see no point in using this to teach programming (when more appropriate choices are available to students with that kind of lack of experience/understanding area available) and I certainly don't see a point in using it to write code outside of Apple's own ecosystem.

If I were "self-teaching" myself programming, I'd learn on Visual Basic or Delphi/ObjectPascal and then graduate to C++, C#, or Java (or Swift) depending on the software I was developing and/or the platforms I was developing for.

Support for anything other than Objective-C and Swift from Apple is horrible, so you have to take the lesser of two evils there, unless you are going to use something like Qt or wxWidgets with poor tooling support on a Mac.