Last year at WWDC 2014, Apple announced their Swift programming language which was met with huge cheers during its announcement, and rightfully so as the language helps make developing for iOS a lot easier and more efficient, not to mention offering powerful tools to the developers who take advantage of it.
That being said with so many different languages available at the moment, how does Swift rank among them? Especially when you consider how young it is? As it turns out Swift is extremely popular amongst developers. According to a recent survey conducted by Stack Overflow (via VentureBeat), it has been discovered that Swift is the most popular language used by developers in the past year.
The survey polled 26,086 people from 157 countries, 6,800 of whom identified themselves as full-stack developers, 1,900 as mobile developers, 1,200 as front-end developers, and 12,000 as something else. Based on that, Apple’s Swift programming language managed to nab 77.8% of the survey as the language that these developers have used in the past year.
Coming in at second place is C++11 at 75.8%, and Rust at 73.8%. The developers have also identified Salesforce as the technology they “most dread” working with. So developers, what do you guys make of these numbers? Do you agree that Apple’s Swift has tremendous appeal and potential, or do you find other languages/platforms better to develop with?