Apple's Objective-C programming language has lost its place in the top 20 most popular programming languages, according to Tiobe . However, another old programming language, Fortran, seems to have resurfaced.
Objective-C, which was replaced by Swift for iOS and macOS app development, has fallen out of the top 20 most popular languages, according to the April 2021 edition of the Tiobe Programming Community Index.
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While it's been seven years since Apple released Swift, Objective-C has continued to remain on Tiobe's list of the top 20 most popular languages. Objective-C was ranked third in 2014, before Swift was released.
Tiobe provides software quality analyses for corporate clients and bases its ranking on the share of total searches for each language, according to many popular search engines.
Last year, Objective-C began to fall lower and lower on the list. Tiobe considered that Objective-C remained popular in part because the adoption of Swift slowed down, as mobile app developers turned to languages that could be used to create applications on multiple platforms.
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Swift has meanwhile fallen to the 15th position in the Tiobe index today, from the 11th position in April 2020.
Another notable change is the reappearance of Fortran on the list, now in 20th place, up from 34th a year ago. Fortran, which was created by IBM in the 1950s, remains popular on computers used for scientific purposes. Its highest ranking on the Tiobe index was 10th in 2002.
“This dinosaur has returned to the top 20 after more than 10 years. Fortran was the first commercial programming language ever created 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 list this month, climbing from the 48th position last April to the current 17th position. But it was at the 10th position in January 2021, according to Tiobe.
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This month's top 10 programming languages were: C, Java, Python, C++, C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript, Assembly Language, PHP, and SQL.
The others that completed the list were: Classic Visual Basic, Delphi / Object Pascal, Ruby, Go, Swift, R, Groovy, Perl, MATLAB and Fortran.
The ranking of programming languages for Q1 2021, according to analyst RedMonk, was: JavaScript followed by Python, Java, PHP, C #, CSS, TypeScript, Ruby and C.
