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

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.