February Headline: Objective-C on its way out
Objective-C lost this month another 7 positions in the TIOBE index, thus being on the brink of slipping out of the top 20. Actually this drop took much longer than expected. In 2014 Apple announced the new programming language Swift to be the successor of Objective-C. At that moment Objective-C was at position #3 in the TIOBE index and development of mobile apps for iPhones and iPads was booming. After the announcement Objective-C dropped from 12% market share in 2014 to 1% market share in 2016. Suprisingly Swift grew from 1% to only 2% at that same time. The other 10% was consumed by other programming languages that appeared to be compilable for multiple mobile platforms. One might conclude that Apple made a mistake to insult iOS programmers by bluntly replacing Objective-C by Swift, but actually they hadn't got a choice. Objective-C was outdated as a programming language and definitely needed a redesign. In my view it would have been better to extend Objective-C with modern features step by step. Just like languages such as Java, C++ and C# survived by making small changes every new release. Now Apple lost 10% of its programming language market share by making this move. Having said this, Swift is now at position #10 of the TIOBE index.
编程语言排行榜 TOP 50 榜单
| 排名 | 编程语言 | 流行度 | 对比上月 | 年度明星语言 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Java | 17.358% | 0.462% | 2015, 2005 |
| 2 | C | 16.766% | 0.993% | 2017, 2008, 2019 |
| 3 | Python | 9.345% | 0.359% | 2010, 2007, 2018 |
| 4 | C++ | 6.164% | 0.59% | 2003 |
| 5 | C# | 5.927% | 0.578% | |
| 6 | Visual Basic .NET | 5.862% | 0.575% | |
| 7 | JavaScript | 2.060% | 0.391% | 2014 |
| 8 | PHP | 2.018% | 0.387% | 2004 |
| 9 | SQL | 1.526% | 0.022% | |
| 10 | Swift | 1.460% | 0.335% | |
| 11 | Go | 1.131% | 0.231% | 2016, 2009 |
| 12 | Assembly language | 1.111% | 0.234% | |
| 13 | R | 1.005% | 0.197% | |
| 14 | D | 0.917% | 0.092% | |
| 15 | Ruby | 0.844% | 0.219% | 2006 |
| 16 | MATLAB | 0.794% | 0.057% | |
| 17 | PL/SQL | 0.764% | 0.189% | |
| 18 | Delphi/Object Pascal | 0.748% | 0.249% | |
| 19 | Perl | 0.697% | 0.049% | |
| 20 | Objective-C | 0.688% | 0.241% | 2012, 2011 |
| 21 | SAS | 0.656% | 0.052% | |
| 22 | Visual Basic | 0.603% | 0.228% | |
| 23 | Dart | 0.553% | 0.082% | |
| 24 | Scratch | 0.532% | 0.042% | |
| 25 | Scala | 0.450% | 0.072% | |
| 26 | Groovy | 0.413% | 0.195% | |
| 27 | Transact-SQL | 0.379% | 0.032% | 2013 |
| 28 | F# | 0.352% | 0.12% | |
| 29 | Rust | 0.346% | 0.049% | |
| 30 | COBOL | 0.339% | 0.043% | |
| 31 | ABAP | 0.309% | 0.055% | |
| 32 | Lisp | 0.294% | 0.104% | |
| 33 | Kotlin | 0.267% | 0.027% | |
| 34 | Logo | 0.253% | 0.161% | |
| 35 | RPG | 0.240% | 0.157% | |
| 36 | Lua | 0.235% | 0.009% | |
| 37 | Fortran | 0.229% | 0.084% | |
| 38 | PowerShell | 0.209% | 新上榜 | |
| 39 | Ada | 0.206% | 0.056% | |
| 40 | LabVIEW | 0.176% | 0.024% | |
| 41 | Erlang | 0.174% | 新上榜 | |
| 42 | Julia | 0.170% | 0.014% | |
| 43 | ML | 0.169% | 0.105% | |
| 44 | Scheme | 0.169% | 0.028% | |
| 45 | Haskell | 0.160% | 0.035% | |
| 46 | TypeScript | 0.155% | 0.025% | |
| 47 | OpenEdge ABL | 0.150% | 0.068% | |
| 48 | LiveCode | 0.146% | 0.131% | |
| 49 | PostScript | 0.144% | 新上榜 | |
| 50 | ActionScript | 0.142% | 0.07% |