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Swift Tops List of Most-Loved Languages and Tech
Nerval's Lobster writes Perhaps developers are increasingly overjoyed at the prospect of building iOS apps with a language other than Objective-C, which Apple has positioned Swift to replace; whatever the reason, Swift topped Stack Overflow's recent survey of the "Most Loved" languages and technologies (cited by 77.6 percent of the 26,086 respondents), followed by C++11 (75.6 percent), Rust (73.8 percent), Go (72.5 percent), and Clojure (71 percent). The "Most Dreaded" languages and technologies included Salesforce (73.2 percent), Visual Basic (72 percent), WordPress (68.2 percent), MATLAB (65.6 percent), and SharePoint (62.8 percent). Those results were mirrored somewhat in recent list from RedMonk, a tech-industry analyst firm, which ranked Swift 22nd in popularity among programming languages (based on data drawn from GitHub and Stack Overflow) but climbing noticeably quickly.
Fuck off Dice we don't care about your shitty fluff pieces passing as news! You will not get any ad dollars from me and I encourage everyone else not to click or respond to this garbage.
Take a look at the demographics of the people that responded. Overwhelmingly male, average age is 29, half have been coding for less than 5 years, and almost half don't have at least a BS degree in CS.
It's easy to love Swift now since it's relatively new. Enough time hasn't gone by yet for projects to grow big enough to discover all of its shortcomings. I did like many of the core concepts behind Swift when I first heard about it, but I'm not a fan of its low type safety as well as the fact that it only works on one platform.
Modern (.NET) VB is nearly C# with more english-like syntax. I don't understand all the hate for the language.
Gonna agree with SharePoint though. :)
"They" are all of the programmers who have come before you. The computer engineers bemoaned COBOL because it let non engineers make programs to run on computers without knowing what was going on under the hood. Same with FORTRAN.
As languages have progressed, each generation provided more abstraction and let people get farther away from the hardware without having to understand what was going on at lower levels. And every time a language provided a new abstraction, the old guard pissed and moaned about how it was destroying programming by making it so the next generation wouldn't have to know all of the lower level details they knew. Object oriented languages were yet another in a long line of language advances that were decried by the previous generation who didn't want to learn the high level abstractions and were mad that the low level details they know well were no longer important. They claimed that the people who just wanted to program at a high level were "incompetent" and how it was leading to a "general cretinization of programming, and consequentially programmers."
Funny thing though. Most modern day programmers have no real clue what's really going on behind the scenes and they're pretty clueless about what happens once their source code goes through the compiler. And that's my definition of "incompetent". So when you say "Swift is for the incompetent", I say that incompetent people can write code in pretty much any language because I've seen them do it for decades over many generations of languages well before anyone knew what Object Orientation was.
Not only that, the old-timer "get off my lawn" types have been spouting the same nonsense since the 50's when it comes to newer technology. Sure, some languages are targeted at making tasks simple so they're easier for simpletons to use. And, of course, some languages are more poorly designed than others (*cough* *cough* C++ *cough* *cough*). And there are many languages that are more difficult to learn and master than others for no good reason. But people have been deriding next generation languages since the first generation. And that's why I laugh at your characterization of Swift.
Well swift has a bucket load of nice clean language features for a compiled language.
That seems like a reason to me. Cleanliness.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.