Maybe the review it's NOT accurate enough, but in general it should be a stark reminder for Swift design team.
The original report is here: The most popular programming languages in 2024 (and what that even means) | ZDNET
It’s more balanced than the piece written by “fudzilla” (why anyone would trust a site that literally starts its name with “FUD” I’m not sure).
Hope one day we'll stop measuring languages by their popularity, so that businesses won't make decisions based on that.
Thanks for the original link, the brief rehash at fudzilla was so badly written that I didn't bother responding.
One thing I notice about the list is that all of the languages are highly cross-platform, with regular use on multiple major OS platforms, with the possible exception of C# and Kotlin. Swift does pretty well considering it's mostly used on Darwin platforms today.
Of course, that is changing, as I was just reading this substack post from earlier this year about the state of Swift tooling on Windows by Jeremy from The Browser Company. I suspect they are planning on releasing an Android SDK also with Swift 6, just like I hope to release an Android SDK bundle in the coming months that can be used easily with any of the linux/mac/win host toolchains.
Your static SDK for linux has garnered a lot of attention, and work on linux and embedded is ongoing.
I think it is too early to predict how this next wave of languages ends up doing. Maybe they will completely supplant older languages like C, C++, Java, and Javascript, or maybe some of those older languages will adapt and resurge again.
my anecdotal experience is that Swift is more of a “pro” language than some of the other familiar names in that list, in that Swift tends to be over represented among professional developers and under represented among students and hobbyists. given that today’s students are tomorrow’s professionals, this probably isn’t a positive indicator for the language’s future growth.
in my mind, this phenomenon is because of two things: Swift doesn’t work well on Windows (very few packages support it), and the language has changed significantly in recent years which makes it unappealing to design a class for as you are constantly having to rework the course materials. but “stop adding things to the language” is not a serious remedy and i think there are a lot of worse places for a programming language to be than “exclusively for professionals”.
IMO, these surveys on languages are quite biased one way or another. TIOBE index has (at the beginning of the year at least) Scratch among their top languages, how representative is that? And just the fact that there is simply less jobs for Apple ecosystem isn’t indicative of the language itself. Swift clearly has weak spots, such as pointed out Windows support for attracting new developers that just starting out, and it is still holding strong reputation of Apple-only language (some might argue that this is well-deserved). But things change for Swift a lot in a good way I think.
Despite controversial concurrency changes with Swift 6, that’s quite a unique offering, and Apple as well makes some advertisement to expand Swift usage running new servers with it. Ecosystem has grown a lot. We have more applications such as WASM and Embedded, with some great apps using Swift to run cross-platform. Not that everything is perfect, and you clearly can find alternatives that is reacher in some aspects, but Swift has a lot good on its own.
A lot not-so-popular languages are still thrive in certain domains, just not necessarily dominating them.
Swift has asthma The fruity cargo cult Apple is seeing its Swift programming language becoming the monkey pox of coding.
Wow, this article really looks worthy of my time.