But that's not surprising given its ecosystem; as others have mentioned, language success has less to do about its theoretical benefits and more to do about what environments it allows the developer access to. Javascript is the case-in-point; I think few people would argue it is a well-designed language, but if you want to do web development, you're going to need at least a basic understanding of it, so it maintains brutal popularity.
The shocking thing I think isn't how fast Swift has grown, but how fast Objective-C has fallen. The stats from that site don't appear to show that Swift has made up for that.
The overall combination of Swift and Objective-C in those numbers make me believe Apple's decision to make Swift open source is less about goodwill, and more about stopping the bleeding.
But that's not surprising given its ecosystem; as others have mentioned, language success has less to do about its theoretical benefits and more to do about what environments it allows the developer access to. Javascript is the case-in-point; I think few people would argue it is a well-designed language, but if you want to do web development, you're going to need at least a basic understanding of it, so it maintains brutal popularity.