2011's Fastest Growing Language: Objective-C

mikejuk writes "Every January, it is traditional to compare the state of programming language usage as indicated by the TIOBE index. So what's up and what's down this year? The top language is still Java, but it's slowly falling in the percentages. Objective-C experienced the most growth, followed by C# and C. JavaScript climbed back into the top 10, displacing Ruby. Python and PHP experienced the biggest drops. If you like outside runners, then cheer for Lua and R, which have just entered the top 20. However, I have to wonder why Logo is in the top 20 as well. I know programming education is becoming important, but Logo?"

Comments

Objective-C growth

[bonch]

Objective-C's growth in popularity coincides with the Flurry Analytics study that showed most mobile developers targeting iOS, with support for Android dropping by a third over 2011. C# will probably continue to see increasing interest because of WinRT. Lua is unsurprising because of its popular use in games, and they just released 5.2 last December. What I find most interesting is that plain old C is set to overtake Java.

Of course, if you don't take the Tiobe rankings seriously, than all of this is moot, but I guess it's something to talk about on a Friday.

Re:Objective-C growth

[Smallpond]

Let's compare it to the number of unanswered questions on stackoverflow.com for various language tags:

c# 31971
java 28099
javascript 26978
php 26755
objective-c 11749
python 9078
c++ 8024
ruby 5080

C, Perl, Basic, Lisp, etc - none

C#

[Anonymous Coward]

How is the real story not that C# is 3rd up from 6th!

Re:C#

[Bryan-10021]

Java is slowly dropping from enterprise usage and is being replaced by C#.

Really? Show me where C# is slowly replacing Java in the enterprise? On the server side Java has no competition. If C# is replacing Java then that would mean companies are also replacing UNIX with Windows as it's the only platform that supports C# (forget Mono). That's definitely not happening.

Re:The top 20

[Hatta]

Cheers for R! I didn't expect to see a statistical programming environment on this list, but I'm not surprised either. R is getting really big in bioinformatics, which is a burgeoning field right now. I used R myself more often in 2011 than in any previous year, and I'm sure I'll use it more this year. If you use Excel, especially if you use macros or VBscript, you should give R a look. Steeper learning curve, but far more powerful and rewarding.

Re:Objective C

[fyngyrz]

I'm in the midst of a pretty large image processing project for OS X, and the UI "wrapper", which is minimal, is in ObjC, but everything else is in C, implemented as a library. So we barely code in ObjC at all.

Seems to me that terms like "must" are being thrown around here without any real knowledge of the options available.