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.

Comments

Matlab

[CurryCamel]

Matlab? Dreaded? Why?
I don't like it. But its good for its purpose, I find.

Re:Matlab

[Enry]

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.

Re:Matlab

[Gavagai80]

Are you saying that if they were overwhelmingly female that they would appreciate MATLAB more?

Possibly, since women are much more likely to be math majors than comp sci majors and nearly anyone who studies math learns MATLAB.

Re:Matlab

[EmeraldBot]

Are you saying that if they were overwhelmingly female that they would appreciate MATLAB more?

Possibly, since women are much more likely to be math majors than comp sci majors and nearly anyone who studies math learns MATLAB.

The gender doesn't matter, it's the experience level. These guys are hipsters, and quite literally, the tool is older than they are. Further more, I'm sure they're a lot of people who combine their dislike for math with MATLAB itself...

Re:Matlab

[grimmjeeper]

"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.

Re:Matlab

[TechyImmigrant]

Well swift has a bucket load of nice clean language features for a compiled language.
That seems like a reason to me. Cleanliness.

 

Re:Matlab

[TechyImmigrant]

Well swift has a bucket load of nice clean language features for a compiled language.

Can you name 3? (insert cricket chirps here)

Inferred types, for less typing and typos.
Tuples, very handy for lots of uses.
Simple iteration syntax.

None of these are new, but the ensemble is nice and clean in a compiled language. I like python for its simplicity and power, but it's generally interpreted. Swift is a but pythonic, but compiled.

Fuck off Dice

[b1ng0]

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.

Test of Time

[organgtool]

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.

Re:Test of Time

[bluefoxlucid]

Yeah, it's a fad language. We'll see if it sticks like Python, C#, or Java.

Re:Test of Time

[samkass]

This was my reaction to that comment, too. Swift is a strongly typed language, it just infers the type at compile time so the programmer doesn't have to manually enter it when declaring the variable. Considering it also differentiates between variables which can contain "nil" and ones that can't in its type system, I'd say it's one of the most strongly typed languages in common use, so I don't understand the statement.

The one platform thing is a bummer, but it's changing pretty fast right now so I don't blame Apple for not wanting to lock any decisions in with third parties yet. I hope they add it to their pile of open source projects before too long, though. Considering the reference implementation is LLVM-based, it shouldn't be hard for it to become very portable very fast.

(Besides, who doesn't like a language which has the entire unicode character set available for variable names, including the symbols? Can make for some colorful code.)

Re:Test of Time

[Dutch Gun]

It will stick because it was purposefully designed and deployed for practical use among a very broad audience. Objective-C would likely still be a niche language were it not the native language for developing products on Apple platforms. This mass deployment for Apple devices essentially assures it's success - along with the fact that it looks like a pretty decent language on its own merits.

Re:Test of Time

[Alomex]

Yes, the GP post is confusing variable declaration and strong type safety. Experience has shown that we want both.

E.g. "variable x is a string", so if by accident the one time I used it, I happen to write "x=3" I want the compiler to complain and not silently infer the type "x is an integer".

Second, we want variable declarations so that if you accidentally write "usrename" instead of "username" the compiler complains.

Swift doesn't require you to give the type during declaration, which is a minor saving at a cost of many headaches. This is the wrong design decision, though I don't think is particularly critical.

Variables do need to be declared, which is a nice improvement over python and one of a few big things holding python back from total dominance (the others are white space, interpreted not compiled and somewhat weak pointer/data structure support).

Why the hate for VB

[JerryLove]

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. :)

Re:Why the hate for VB

[LWATCDR]

Sharepoint and Wordpress are languages?

Re:Why the hate for VB

[bsDaemon]

They said "languages or technologies" in the summary. Sharepoint, WordPress and SalesForce are platforms that apparently people who responded to the survey don't want to work with.

Most-loved or Most-infatuated?

[QuietLagoon]

It is way too early in Swift lifetime to come to any sort of real opinion about using Swift and maintaining Swift projects over the course of many years.

.
At best, this is little more than puppy-love.

Re:Most-loved or Most-infatuated?

[ameoba]

"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses"

Re:So is it REALLY good?

[bluefoxlucid]

Having used both Objective-C and C++, I can point out Objective-C as being a vast improvement over C without bringing the major drawbacks of C++. For one thing, Objective-C specifies symbol resolution against what is actually available, rather than what is theorized: in C++, if you recompile a library with a new class member--even a new private member--the data structure of the C++ class is now incorrect, and all applications using that library must be recompiled; in Objective-C, you can extend a new interface onto a class.

Largely, Objective-C is C with classes. Along with that, it's C, however you want to take that, with a better OOP implementation than C++. It's not Python or C#.

Re:What has Rust been used for?

[gweihir]

Rust is neither very good, nor finished. It promotes the myth that secure software is a question of the tool used. (It is not. It is 100% a question of coder, designer and architect skill and experience.) It just has a rabid follower community with little actual understanding of what they are cheering for and how it actually compares. That alone already makes it a problem, not a solution.

Re:Don't see it

[gTsiros]

holy shit

a three-digiter

quick, where's my bug-net, before it flies away

Swift loved 'cause ObjC (and frameworks) supported

[SuperKendall]

I've been using Swift for production work since shortly after it was released (much of it on an internal enterprise application which is how we were able to start using it right away).

What makes Swift really nice to use in its own right is that it has a lot of useful language features (like closures, generics, tuples, etc) with a syntax that can be kind of boiled away to the degree that you choose, to keep code clear and understandable. I think the best way I could describe it, is that it's like a functional language buy is very practical and doesn't get preachy about it.

So already the language is very pleasant to use. The real benefit Swift enjoys that give it such a high rating though, is that it comes with very advanced tooling and a super-integrated mirror-counterpart language (Objective-C) right out of the box.

Think about it, how many new languages like Rust suffer because you have to build up syntax highlighting support in the editors you like, figure out a new build process tailored to that language, how to run the applications and so on. With Swift if you knew XCode you could easily just start writing Swift and all of the annoying overhead was gone. Even if you DIDN'T know XCode, at least it's a pretty advanced tool dedicated to helping produce running code in very short order (VERY short order with Playgrounds).

Then along with that, you have a new language which invariably has some missing features or capabilities, that make some particular thing you are trying to do hard in the new language. Well in those cases, Objective-C is very close at hand - you can mix code from both languages easily in the same class even. For example Swift itself is strongly typed and has very few reflection or dynamic method lookup features yet. Objective-C is kind of the opposite way, full of dynamism and runtime reflective use, so you can jump over to those abilities as needed.

I don't think people outside the iOS community realize just how fast everyone doing iOS development is switching to Swift. Swift (for me) has actually worked really well since day1, the tooling was rough for a while (with the syntax highlighter/code completion crapping out regularily on Swift code) but I THINK it may finally be OK.

It's definitely not a case of people hating Objective-C, because a lot of the people that like Swift also liked Objective-C. It's a case of having some good tools already, and being given another tool that seems to work really well for some tasks and thus appreciating having an expanded toolbox...

Re:Don't see it

[MassacrE]

Damn, a sub-700-er!

Re:Don't see it

[Enry]

n00b

Re:Don't see it

[jpatters]

Damn, a sub-800-er!