However, Swift’s Apple-centric focus could prevent the language from climbing much higher
The Swift language was introduced to much fanfare by Apple in June 2014, positioned as a modern successor to the Objective-C language that has driven iOS and MacOS application development. Now, Swift has cracked the top 10 in Tiobe’s language popularity index, demonstrating momentum for the fledgling language as it approaches its third birthday. But Tiobe has doubts about how far up in the rankings Swift can move, given its Apple-centric focus.
Tiobe’s March index has Swift in 10th place with a 2.268 percent rating. “The expectations [for Swift] were high right from the start, but adoption took off slowly,” a report accompanying the index states. “That is for good reasons by the way, because the installed base of Objective-C code is quite large. “
While developers are writing new applications in Swift, they are not actively migrating old applications written in Objective-C to Swift, Tiobe said.
