Apple’s Swift programming language is growing.
Per Cult of Mac’s Twitter post and RedMonk, the Swift programming language is gaining ground on GitHub and Stack Overflow,
Besides the noted plot, which can be difficult to parse even at full size, we offer the following numerical rankings. As will be observed, this run produced several ties which are reflected below:
1 JavaScript
2 Java
3 PHP
4 Python
5 C#
5 C++
5 Ruby
8 CSS
9 C
10 Objective-C
11 Perl
11 Shell
13 R
14 Scala
15 Haskell
16 Matlab
17 Go
17 Visual Basic
19 Clojure
19 Groovy
By the narrowest of margins, JavaScript edged Java for the top spot in the rankings, but as always, the difference between the two is so marginal as to be insignificant. The most important takeaway is that the language frequently written off for dead and the language sometimes touted as the future have shown sustained growth and traction and remain, according to this measure, the most popular offerings.
Outside of that change, the Top 10 was effectively static. C++ and Ruby jumped each one spot to split fifth place with C#, but that minimal distinction reflects the lack of movement of the rest of the “Tier 1,” or top grouping of languages. PHP has not shown the ability to unseat either Java or JavaScript, but it has remained unassailable for its part in the third position. After a brief drop in Q1 of 2014, Python has been stable in the fourth spot, and the rest of the Top 10 looks much as it has for several quarters.
Swift itself is proving to be a curious case. In recent 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. Given this dramatic ascension, it seems reasonable to expect that the Q3 rankings this year will see Swift as a Top 20 language.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.