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Objective-C Use Falls Hard, Apple's Swift On the Rise (dice.com)
Nerval's Lobster writes: When Apple rolled out Swift last summer, it expected its new programming language to eventually replace Objective-C, which developers have used for years to build iOS and Mac OS X apps. Thanks to Apple's huge developer ecosystem (and equally massive footprint in the world of consumer devices), Swift quickly became one of the most buzzed-about programming languages, as cited by sites such as Stack Overflow. And now, according to new data from TIOBE Software, which keeps a regularly updated index of popular programming languages, Swift might be seriously cannibalizing Objective-C. On TIOBE's latest index, Objective-C is ranked fourteenth among programming languages, a considerable drop from its third-place spot in October 2014. Swift managed to climb from nineteenth to fifteenth during the same period. "Soon after Apple announced to switch from Objective-C to Swift, Objective-C went into free fall," read TIOBE's text accompanying the data. "This month Objective-C dropped out of the TIOBE index top 10." How soon until Swift eclipses Objective-C entirely?
Ah, yes. Dice "insights" stating the obvious long after everyone else figured it out.
Keep that in mind when you consider how accurate the Tiobe index is.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Except Mono sucks.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
These are open source of course (Objective-C is a part of GCC too). But practically speaking it will stick to being an Apple specific tool.
I'm not sure what the right answer is, but it won't be found in a niche language whose sole purpose is to support one company's ecosystem and lock in developers to their platforms.
It's less niche than at least two dozen programming languages /. has hyped as the best thing since sliced bread. Sometimes I feel this place has become a bunch of grumpy old farts who think C and POSIX was the pinnacle of computer science and everything since has just been poorly reinventing the wheel. Or that programming should be for real men who could hand code it in assembly and that high level languages is just another attempt to recreate COBOL or Visual Basic. There's not a whole lot of money in creating programming languages, just ask Sun. And if you don't have widespread adoption, you're never getting off the ground. That's why the OSS community is still trying to create UI apps using 1980s tech, sure Qt is a decent band aid and GTK.... well it's a band aid, but the base language is way behind Java, C# and Swift. Not in what you can theoretically do, but in terms of how easy it is to do it.
Besides, Microsoft is open sourcing .NET Core, Apple has promised to open source Swift within the end of the year, Java has of course been open a while with the OpenJDK so it seems like the days of the base language being closed source is coming to an end. Of course they all do it with their own platform in mind, but desktop Linux could use a few allies. Yes, GNOME and KDE has been at it for a very long time but have they managed to get any market share? Once a percent of nerds, nobody else.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Anything that is produced solely by a corporation is proprietary, no matter if it is open source or not. Apple controls swift, just like Google controls Android and Microsoft controls C# and Sun controls Java.