Objective-C, the programming language replaced by Apple’s Swift for iOS and macOS app development, has finally dropped the top 20 most popular languages, according to the April 2021 issue of the Tiobe Programming Community Index.
Although it’s been seven years since Apple released Swift, Objective-C still remains in Tiobe’s top 20 list of the most popular languages in the world. Objective-C was third on the index in 2014 when Swift appeared.
Tiobe provides software quality analysis for customers for businesses and bases its rankings on the share of total searches for each language according to various popular search engines.
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Over the past year, Objective-C has slowly but surely fallen on the list. Tiobe believed that Objective-C remained popular in part because Swift adoption slowed as developers of mobile applications turned to languages that could be used to build applications across multiple platforms.
Swift, meanwhile, fell to 15th position on Tiobe’s index, from 11th place in April 2020.
Another notable change is the re-emergence of Fortran in the index at the 20th position, compared to the 34th place a year ago. Fortran, which originated with IBM in the 1950s, is still popular in scientific computers. His highest ranking on Tiobe’s index was tenth place in 2002.
“This dinosaur is back in the top 20 after more than ten years. Fortran was the first commercial programming language ever, and is becoming popular due to the great need for (scientific) number manipulation. Welcome back Fortran,” says Tiobe.
Groovy, a language used on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), also returned to the top 20 this month, rising from 48th position last April to its current 17th position. According to Tiobe, however, it was in tenth position in January 2021.
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The top 10 programming languages this month were: C, Java, Python, C ++, C #, Visual Basic, JavaScript, Assembly Language, PHP and SQL.
The top 20 are rounded off: Classic Visual Basic, Delphi / Object Pascal, Ruby, Go, Swift, R, Groovy, Perl, MATLAB and Fortran.
Development analyst RedMonk’s Q1 2021 programming language rankings were led by JavaScript, followed by Python, Java, PHP, C #, CSS, TypeScript, Ruby, and C.