Objective-C, the programming language replaced by Apple’s Swift for iOS and macOS application development, finally fell from the 20 most popular languages, according to the April 2021 edition of the Tiobe Programming Community index.
Although it has been seven years since Apple launched Swift, Objective-C has continued to remain on the list of the 20 most popular languages in the world of Tiobe. Objective-C was third on the index in 2014, when Swift arrived.
Tiobe provides software quality analysis to corporate customers and bases its ratings on the share of total searches for each language, according to several popular search engines.
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In the past year, Objective-C has slowly but surely dropped on that list. Tiobe theorized that Objective-C remained popular in part because the adoption of Swift declined as mobile application developers turned to languages that could be used to build applications across multiple platforms.
Meanwhile, Swift fell to 15th position on the Tiobe index today, down from 11th in April 2020.
Another notable change is the resurgence of Fortran in the index in 20th position, up from 34th position a year ago. Fortran, which emerged from IBM in the 1950s, remains popular in scientific computing. Its highest ranking in the Tiobe index was the 10th in 2002.
“This dinosaur is back in the top 20 after more than 10 years. Fortran was the first commercial programming language of all time and is gaining popularity thanks to the huge need for (scientific) number processing. Welcome back Fortran “says Tiobe.
Groovy, a language that runs on the Java virtual machine (JVM), also returned to the top 20 this month, rising from 48th position last April to the current 17th position. But it was in 10th position in January 2021, according to Tiobe.
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The top 10 programming languages for this month were: C, Java, Python, C ++, C #, Visual Basic, JavaScript, Assembly language, PHP and SQL.
Completing the top 20 were: Visual Basic Classic, Delphi / Object Pascal, Ruby, Go, Swift, R, Groovy, Perl, MATLAB and Fortran.
RedMonk developer Q1 2021 programming language classifications were led by JavaScript, followed by Python, Java, PHP, C #, CSS, TypeScript, Ruby and C.