TIOBE Index for March 2017
March Headline: Swift enters the top 10 for the first time
This month Swift enters the TIOBE index top 10 for the first time. About 3 years ago Apple announced that it would replace its "ancient" native mobile app development language Objective-C by its newborn language called Swift. The expectations were high right from the start, but adoptation took off slowly. That is for good reasons by the way because the installed base of Objective-C code is quite large. New applications are written in Swift, whereas old apps that are written in Objective-C are not actively migrated to Swift. This is also what we observe at customer sites. Since Swift is mainly intended to write applications in Apple's ecosystem, it is expected that it won't rise much further.
The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. It is important to note that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.
The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be found
here.