When we see dramatic growth from a language it typically has jumped somewhere between 5 and 10 spots, and the closer the language gets to the Top 20 or within it, the more difficult growth is to come by. And yet Swift has gone from our 68th ranked language during Q3 to number 22 this quarter, a jump of 46 spots.
After all these years, JavaScript has finally become TIOBE's language of the year. It was a close finish. Swift and R appeared to be the main candidates for the title but due to a deep fall of Objective-C this month, a lot of other languages took advantage of this and surpassed these two candidates at the last moment.It is always tempting to try to forecast what will change in 2015. Objective-C will probably lose its dominant position in mobile app development, whereas Java and Swift will gain traction in that field. Java might even become number one of the TIOBE index again.
Q: What languages, or features of languages, inspired you?Gosling: They're all over the map. Using Lisp, the thing that influenced me the most was the incredible difference garbage collection made. Using Simula and being a local maintainer of the Simula compiler was really what introduced me to objects and got me thinking about objects. Using languages like Pascal got me really thinking about modeling. Languages like Modula-3 really pushed things like exception mechanisms. I've used a lot of languages, and a lot of them have been influential. You can go through everything in Java and say, "this came from there, and this came from there."
Hejlsberg: First of all, C# is not a Java clone. In the design of C#, we looked at a lot of languages. We looked at C++, we looked at Java, at Modula 2, C, and we looked at Smalltalk. There are just so many languages that have the same core ideas that we're interested in, such as deep object-orientation, object-simplification, and so on.
Apple's new Swift programming language has only been available for a few months, but iOS and OS X developers from American Airlines, Getty Images, LinkedIn and Duolingo are reporting favorable impressions -- ranging from increased productivity to fewer bugs in their shipping apps -- as interest in the new language rapidly accelerates.