A new report studying programming language rankings released yesterday by RedMonk shows that Apple’s new language, Swift, went from 68 place on the list to 22 this quarter—a jump of 46 spots.
Apple first unveiled Swift during its Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2014 and said it “makes it easier than ever for developers to create incredible apps.” Swift promised to reduce common programming errors, and since it can coexist with Object-C, developers could integrate it into their existing apps.
Describing Swift’s growth as “meteoric,” RedMonk said it expects to see Swift to break into the top 20 this year. That seems like a reasonable bet to me.
It’s also interesting to note that Objective-C was ranked No. 10 on the list of programming languages similar to ajax calls. JavaScript, Java, PHP, and Python were the top four languages.
RedMonk had this to say about Swift:
> Last, there is the curious case of Swift. During our last rankings, Swift was listed as the language to watch – an obvious choice given its status as the Apple-anointed successor to the #10 language on our list, Objective-C. Being officially sanctioned as the future standard for iOS applications everywhere was obviously going to lead to growth. As was said during the Q3 rankings which marked its debut, “Swift is a language that is going to be a lot more popular, and very soon.” Even so, the growth that Swift experienced is essentially unprecedented in the history of these rankings. When we see dramatic growth from a language it typically has jumped somewhere between 5 and 10 spots, and the closer the language gets to the Top 20 or within it, the more difficult growth is to come by. And yet Swift has gone from our 68th ranked language during Q3 to number 22 this quarter, a jump of 46 spots. From its position far down on the board, Swift now finds itself one spot behind Coffeescript and just ahead of Lua. As the plot suggests, Swift’s growth is more obvious on StackOverflow than GitHub, where the most active Swift repositories are either educational or infrastructure in nature, but even so the growth has been remarkable.