Objective-C plummets in popularity
Objective-C, which has been a staple of software development for Apple platforms, slumped in this month’s Tiobe Index of programming language popularity, falling out of the top 20 for the first time since late-2009.
Objective-C ranked 23rd in Tiobe’s April index with a rating of 0.67 percent. It had entered the top 20 in October 2009 and earned Tiobe’s language of the year honors (given to the language with the most growth in popularity) in 2011 and 2012. Objective-C placed 20th in last month’s index, with a rating of 0.91 percent.
Tiobe, a software quality services vendor, said that Objective-C’s slip out of the top 20 took longer than expected, and cited the rise of Apple’s Swift, a more modern language for MacOS and iOS development that debuted in June 2014, as a factor in Objective-C’s downfall. Swift ranked 15th in the April index, with a rating of 1.19 percent.