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Programming Apple IT

Swift Tops List of Most-Loved Languages and Tech 181

Nerval's Lobster writes Perhaps developers are increasingly overjoyed at the prospect of building iOS apps with a language other than Objective-C, which Apple has positioned Swift to replace; whatever the reason, Swift topped Stack Overflow's recent survey of the "Most Loved" languages and technologies (cited by 77.6 percent of the 26,086 respondents), followed by C++11 (75.6 percent), Rust (73.8 percent), Go (72.5 percent), and Clojure (71 percent). The "Most Dreaded" languages and technologies included Salesforce (73.2 percent), Visual Basic (72 percent), WordPress (68.2 percent), MATLAB (65.6 percent), and SharePoint (62.8 percent). Those results were mirrored somewhat in recent list from RedMonk, a tech-industry analyst firm, which ranked Swift 22nd in popularity among programming languages (based on data drawn from GitHub and Stack Overflow) but climbing noticeably quickly.
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Swift Tops List of Most-Loved Languages and Tech

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  • Matlab (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CurryCamel ( 2265886 ) on Monday April 20, 2015 @02:35PM (#49513577) Journal

    Matlab? Dreaded? Why?
    I don't like it. But its good for its purpose, I find.

    • Re:Matlab (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Enry ( 630 ) <enry@@@wayga...net> on Monday April 20, 2015 @02:39PM (#49513629) Journal

      Take a look at the demographics of the people that responded. Overwhelmingly male, average age is 29, half have been coding for less than 5 years, and almost half don't have at least a BS degree in CS.

      • by bsDaemon ( 87307 )

        Are you saying that if they were overwhelmingly female that they would appreciate MATLAB more? I don't see how that has anything to do with the other things, which merely point out how a bunch of hipsters who don't really understand computers would rather work with mostly easy languages to do "app" development than to work with anything in environments that indicate either some domain knowledge (MATLAB) or a "real job" (Salesforce, SharePoint).

        Also, consider that it is Stack Overflow. It's mostly code-sni

        • Are you saying that if they were overwhelmingly female that they would appreciate MATLAB more?

          Possibly, since women are much more likely to be math majors than comp sci majors and nearly anyone who studies math learns MATLAB.

          • Are you saying that if they were overwhelmingly female that they would appreciate MATLAB more?

            Possibly, since women are much more likely to be math majors than comp sci majors and nearly anyone who studies math learns MATLAB.

            The gender doesn't matter, it's the experience level. These guys are hipsters, and quite literally, the tool is older than they are. Further more, I'm sure they're a lot of people who combine their dislike for math with MATLAB itself...

          • by aralin ( 107264 )

            .... nearly anyone who studies math learns MATLAB.

            Hence the dread! Back in '94 to '99 I've been sysadmin at the math department of my university. Already then all the students that were learning Matlab dreaded the subject. I was observing lesson after lesson, year after year, since they happened at the Comp. Lab. I was managing, always the same thing.

        • by Enry ( 630 )

          Are you saying that if they were overwhelmingly female that they would appreciate MATLAB more?

          I don't know. In my only actual programming job in the early 90s I worked with some great MUMPS developers who happened to be female and they were at a far higher percentage of the developers I worked with than listed in the survey. I'm just pointing out that the demographics of the SO survey may not really represent what the programming community is, so what they say as what they like may not be reality.

          Also, consider that it is Stack Overflow. It's mostly code-snipet "programmers" and people looking for help with homework.

          That's true. It's been a real help in (re)learning Python.

      • by Tom ( 822 )

        So, your average software developer. Which explains a lot about why software quality sucks so much. (and then someone writes six code analysis tools and ten testing tools to at least catch the shit before it hits the fan).

    • by iris-n ( 1276146 )

      Matlab is the worst piece of shit I ever had the displeasure of working with. I only use this crap because the SDP interpreters I like (YALMIP and CVX) don't support anything else.

      Once I had a bug in a code I had been writing for more than a month, and after lots of work I tracked it down to a vector declaration of the kind

      v = [a, b +c];

      You know what Matlab thought this meant?

      v = [a, b, c];

      Yep. It interpreted a whitespace between 'b' and '+' as creating a new vector element. And it's not even consistent, if

  • Fuck off Dice (Score:4, Insightful)

    by b1ng0 ( 7449 ) on Monday April 20, 2015 @02:38PM (#49513617)

    Fuck off Dice we don't care about your shitty fluff pieces passing as news! You will not get any ad dollars from me and I encourage everyone else not to click or respond to this garbage.

    • Fuck off Dice we don't care about your shitty fluff pieces passing as news! You will not get any ad dollars from me and I encourage everyone else not to click or respond to this garbage.

      Why are you so harsh with them? It's a great company that creates interesting, unbiased and entertaining content!

      Oh wait, I thought you meant Vice, not Dice. Sorry about that.

  • Test of Time (Score:5, Insightful)

    by organgtool ( 966989 ) on Monday April 20, 2015 @02:40PM (#49513639)
    It's easy to love Swift now since it's relatively new. Enough time hasn't gone by yet for projects to grow big enough to discover all of its shortcomings. I did like many of the core concepts behind Swift when I first heard about it, but I'm not a fan of its low type safety as well as the fact that it only works on one platform.
    • Yeah, it's a fad language. We'll see if it sticks like Python, C#, or Java.
      • It will stick because it was purposefully designed and deployed for practical use among a very broad audience. Objective-C would likely still be a niche language were it not the native language for developing products on Apple platforms. This mass deployment for Apple devices essentially assures it's success - along with the fact that it looks like a pretty decent language on its own merits.

  • by JerryLove ( 1158461 ) on Monday April 20, 2015 @02:44PM (#49513661)

    Modern (.NET) VB is nearly C# with more english-like syntax. I don't understand all the hate for the language.

    Gonna agree with SharePoint though. :)

    • by LWATCDR ( 28044 ) on Monday April 20, 2015 @02:46PM (#49513675) Homepage Journal

      Sharepoint and Wordpress are languages?

    • by PRMan ( 959735 )
      Other than working with interfaces, where C# will build a framework for you and VB will not, I really see very little difference to account for the hatred. In fact, the string functions in VB are actually preferable.
    • by Tom ( 822 )

      Same reason that fascism and communism are unlikely to win any elections anytime soon - the name has been tainted by a horrible first version, even if you came up with a perfect current version, nobody would believe it.

    • Why are variables declared with DIM in VB, or DIM ... AS.
      You really think that is english?

      • by Keruo ( 771880 )
        It's an abbreviation: Dim [wikipedia.org]
        • I know what DIM means ;D
          As many others here I started 30 years ago with Basic.

          Hence I know it makes no sense and it is certainly no english to write in VB something like this:


          DIM myObject AS SomeType

          Because that object has no DIMension! Keywords like VAR or VAL or even DEF would have been more appropriated.

    • The survey respondents may have meant VB-Classic, VBA, and/or VB-Script.

      Incidentally, they are generally fine for smaller projects in my opinion. It's when you try to build something complex with them that you get into knots. Languages best for big projects are rarely best for small projects and vice verse. Use the right tool for the job.

    • by Xest ( 935314 )

      Because VB brings us such fucking abominations as:

      If myVar IsNot Nothing AndAlso myVar = "something" Then
      ' do something
      End If

      The problem with VB is in it's attempts to be English like it's just ended up requiring you to spout nonsense. No one says "Is not nothing", they say "Is something".

      It's too verbose and ends up forcing you to write stuff that's inherently less readable than if it didn't try and fudge English into it's syntax.

  • Yes, the new and shiny is most popular. How could that happen?

    By the way, it might be interesting to see this "most loved" thing filtered for "full time employee" and "full time freelancer". I assume that then other languages might appear in the list on top. But anyway, the stack overflow statistics are interesting.

  • by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Monday April 20, 2015 @02:53PM (#49513723)
    It is way too early in Swift lifetime to come to any sort of real opinion about using Swift and maintaining Swift projects over the course of many years.

    .
    At best, this is little more than puppy-love.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Monday April 20, 2015 @06:38PM (#49515699)

    I've been using Swift for production work since shortly after it was released (much of it on an internal enterprise application which is how we were able to start using it right away).

    What makes Swift really nice to use in its own right is that it has a lot of useful language features (like closures, generics, tuples, etc) with a syntax that can be kind of boiled away to the degree that you choose, to keep code clear and understandable. I think the best way I could describe it, is that it's like a functional language buy is very practical and doesn't get preachy about it.

    So already the language is very pleasant to use. The real benefit Swift enjoys that give it such a high rating though, is that it comes with very advanced tooling and a super-integrated mirror-counterpart language (Objective-C) right out of the box.

    Think about it, how many new languages like Rust suffer because you have to build up syntax highlighting support in the editors you like, figure out a new build process tailored to that language, how to run the applications and so on. With Swift if you knew XCode you could easily just start writing Swift and all of the annoying overhead was gone. Even if you DIDN'T know XCode, at least it's a pretty advanced tool dedicated to helping produce running code in very short order (VERY short order with Playgrounds).

    Then along with that, you have a new language which invariably has some missing features or capabilities, that make some particular thing you are trying to do hard in the new language. Well in those cases, Objective-C is very close at hand - you can mix code from both languages easily in the same class even. For example Swift itself is strongly typed and has very few reflection or dynamic method lookup features yet. Objective-C is kind of the opposite way, full of dynamism and runtime reflective use, so you can jump over to those abilities as needed.

    I don't think people outside the iOS community realize just how fast everyone doing iOS development is switching to Swift. Swift (for me) has actually worked really well since day1, the tooling was rough for a while (with the syntax highlighter/code completion crapping out regularily on Swift code) but I THINK it may finally be OK.

    It's definitely not a case of people hating Objective-C, because a lot of the people that like Swift also liked Objective-C. It's a case of having some good tools already, and being given another tool that seems to work really well for some tasks and thus appreciating having an expanded toolbox...

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