JavaScript, PHP Top Most Popular Languages, With Apple's Swift Rising Fast

Nerval's Lobster writes Developers assume that Swift, Apple's newish programming language for iOS and Mac OS X apps, will become extremely popular over the next few years. According to new data from RedMonk, a tech-industry analyst firm, Swift could reach that apex of popularity sooner rather than later. While the usual stalwarts—including JavaScript, Java, PHP, Python, C#, C++, and Ruby—top RedMonk's list of the most-used languages, Swift has, well, swiftly ascended 46 spots in the six months since the firm's last update, from 68th to 22nd. RedMonk pulls data from GitHub and Stack Overflow to create its rankings, due to those sites' respective sizes and the public nature of their data. While its top-ranked languages don't trade positions much between reports, there's a fair amount of churn at the lower end of the rankings. Among those "smaller" languages, R has enjoyed stable popularity over the past six months, Rust and Julia continue to climb, and Go has exploded upwards—although CoffeeScript, often cited as a language to watch, has seen its support crumble a bit.

Comments

Who's surprised by this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Javascript is the barest-metal web language we have, so of course it's popular, especially as ES6 threatens to improve the language. And Swift and Go are heavily endorsed by two of the biggest companies on earth, with Swift being one of only two blessed options available in its ecosystem, just like JS. So anyone surprised by their huge climbs must have more trouble seeing the screen in front of their faces than anything else. It's only surprising when you see something like Rust or Julia climb, as they have to actually struggle to gain adoption, not being the only options in their niches or endorsed by the world's biggest companies.

Re:Who's surprised by this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense. I like functional programming more than most of the people I know, but JS itself is becoming a pretty decent functional language. It's not as "pure" or academically-sanctioned as some of us might want, but it's hardly as bad as a lot of other popular languages. It fact it's already half-decent, and ES6 will even have proper tail recursion. Other popular languages struggle mightily with that concept, while JS is trying to actually make it standard. JS is basically just C++-like in that it has a lot of baggage, and the VMs are still only just starting to achieve a level of maturity where we can truly code efficiently in functional ways. The more people pretend that it's all dire and shitty, the more obvious it becomes that they've never really tried to use JS as a proper language, and are just trying to use it badly. Or that they just want to pretend that it's still 1999, and JS hasn't budged an inch, and isn't moving at all, while Firefox and even IE11 are rapidly implementing ES6 (and Google won't be far behind, if they're thusly put to shame).

Re:68th to 22nd and there are many to go

[iluvcapra]

You can get at pretty much the whole thing now. The only thing you can't do in Swift is create a C function pointer to a Swift code block, so some of the callback-based tasks in CoreAudio and CoreMIDI can't be used. But apart from that calling into C and using C data structures pretty much just works.

The existing APIs aren't very idiomatic to Swift, you gotta do more casts than you probably should have to and there are some really common patterns in Cocoa that are a pain.

Re:not really the whole story

[serviscope_minor]

C/C++ is largely a measure of how many native, high-performance-required applications there are (games, OS development, large native applications)

And embedded things. it remains perenially popular there since the firmware tends to be native and of course high performance within the tiny constraints of something like an 8051.