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Swift's popularity has undergone a meteoric rise for a young language according to TIOBE [http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....]

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.


Given the context it's used in, this is hardly surprising.




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