Apple unveiled Swift, their programming language just four years ago. When they first unveiled this language, people throughout the industry were skeptical of this new language. Apple had used Objective-C as their main language for years, and people weren’t sure if the new language would be successful. This year, Swift reached a new level of success.
Swift is now tied with its predecessor in a ranking of common programming languages, in a recent ranking by RedMonk (update: tied in 2018, Swift moved into 11 and Objective-C kept the 12 spot in 2019). While people might be surprised at the success of Swift, it really makes sense. Swift is the primary language used to build apps for the Mac, iPhone, and Apple Watch platforms. Some companies even use Swift to create web applications. Swift can be used for many different applications, but the speed at which the language has jumped in popularity is simply amazing. Swift is among the fastest growing languages of all time. It jumped into the top 10 before many of its competitors, including Go(Google’s programming language).
While Swift is the biggest story in RedMonk’s ratings, there are other exciting stories. Kotlin, which is supported on Android lept to number 27. Late last year, Kotlin was ranked at number 46, so this is a major jump. Kotlin is definitely a language to watch in the future.
The RedMonk ratings are extremely impressive, but they take some decoding. These rankings don’t always reflect whether these languages are used for real projects. The rankings also don’t tell you how many jobs are available for those that know these languages. RedMonk rates languages based on how many programmers are interested in them. They believe that popularity among developers will eventually lead to the languages being used in real-world projects.
RedMonk develops the rankings by looking at Stack Overflow. They see which questions people are asking about each language, and how many questions there are in total. Additionally, RedMonk looks at GitHub. They track the number of projects posted to GitHub using each language. Drew Conway and John Myles White developed the rankings in 2010, and they’ve become incredibly popular over the last 8 years.
Apple released Swift in 2014. They wanted to develop a language that was easy to learn, and easy for experienced coders to use. Some languages had already made their mark by making the process easier. Some languages had focused on making syntax that is easy to read. Others had built-in features that used to be built from scratch. Unfortunately, these languages usually produced software that ran slowly compared to more difficult to write languages. Swift hoped to be both high-performance and programmer-friendly.
Kotlin had similar goals. The language was made by JetBrains and released in 2016. Kotlin was compatible with Java, which allowed programmers to put Java code into their programs. You could even make new features for existing Java programs using the Kotlin language. Kotlin quickly received attention from developers everywhere. When Google announced Android support for the language, interest in Kotlin boomed. Many people believe that Kotlin will become even more popular than Swift. (update: Kotlin dropped to the 20 spot in 2019)
Swift and Kotlin had major gains in the last year, but most of the other languages held steady. The technology sector features Java and Javascript as the most popular languages. PHP, C#, and Python round out the top 5. It is becoming increasingly difficult for languages to break into the top 20.
Swift will continue to grow, but developers should keep an eye out for Kotlin. Popularity for these languages will keep growing, and could help define the technology sector for years to come.