InfoWorld Tech Watch
July 14, 2014
Swift, Apple's new programming language for iOS and OS X applications, has
rocketed up the charts in two monthly tabulations of programming language
popularity.
Introduced in early June, the language enters the July Tiobe Index at number
16 and did even better on this month's PyPL Popularity of Programming
Language index, placing 10th. "Everybody is curious to know what this new
language is about, especially because it has been developed by Apple," said
Paul Jansen, Tiobe managing director. He speculates interest in Swift will
remain high, unlike Google's Go language, which attracted a lot of interest
in Tiobe's index when it was first released in 2009 but quickly dropped out
of the top 100 for some time before bouncing back a bit to its present spot
of 30th place.
"[Swift] itself is also nothing new, but in contrast to Go it serves a
purpose, i.e. to supersede the outdated Objective-C language. New
applications for iPhone and iPad will all be written in Swift eventually. So
Swift will probably stay in the top 20 for a long while and has the
potential to become a top 10 player." Swift, Jansen said, combines existing
programming paradigms but has no new inventions.
The language already has received a lot of scrutiny from developers taking a
look at issues like performance. And a blogger this week is citing supposed
design mistakes pertaining to mutable and immutable arrays.
The quick high placements in the Tiobe index, which looks at Internet
searches of languages on a number of sites, and PyPL, which looks at
language tutorial searches in Google, further verify the level of interest
in Swift. The language received a 1.054 percent share in the Tiobe index and
a 3 percent share in PyPL. A search on language repositories in GitHub,
meanwhile, finds 260 repositories pertaining to Swift. There were 157
repositories for Swift a month ago.
Placing first again in this month's Tiobe index was the C language (17.145
percent), followed by Java (15.688 percent) and Objective-C (10.294 percent)
. Rounding out the top five were C++ (5.52 percent) and Visual Basic (4.341
percent). Placing sixth to ninth were C# (4.051 percent), PHP (2.916 percent
), Python (2.656 percent), JavaScript (1.806 percent), and Transact-SQL (1.
759 percent).
PyPL's index saw Java take the top spot (26.9 percent), followed by PHP (13.
2 percent), Python (10.7 percent), C# (10.2 percent), and C (8.2 percent).
Placing sixth through ninth were C++ (8.2 percent), JavaScript (7.7 percent)
, Objective-C (6.7 percent), and Ruby (3.2 percent).
This story, "Apple's Swift climbs quickly in language popularity," was
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