Apple's Swift programming language soars in popularity

The programming language created by Apple for developers to make iOS and OS X apps with has made an “unprecedented” jump up the rankings of a league table of the most popular technologies.

Swift was first created in 2010 and the WWDC app which was launched in June last year was the first app written entirely in the new language. It is intended to be more concise – in that the same functionality can be created in fewer lines of code – and safer than competing languages.

Each quarter RedMonk creates a league table of programming languages which it believes will become more popular in the future, by analysing mentions of them on Stack Overflow and the number of lines of code posted to GitHub. This week's list reveals that Apple's Swift has made an unusually large leap up the rankings from 68th place to 22nd.

RedMonk says that the results are not meant to be an indicator of how much each language is used currently, but is “predictive of future use” as it shows that programmers are learning and interacting with the language.

A blog post on the RedMonk website by Stephen O'Grady said: “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.

“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.”