The Swift programming language has made it easier to work with JSON data, thanks to the Codable protocol introduced in Swift 4.0. This protocol allows developers to create structs that can encode and decode JSON data without using external libraries like SwiftyJSON or Alamofire. The example code provided demonstrates how to use Codable structs to parse a JSON string from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day API. It also shows how to use SwiftyJSON and Alamofire, two popular third-party libraries for working with JSON in Swift, to achieve similar results.