Apple's Swift falls back to earth after initial surge

Initial enthusiasm for Apple's newly introduced Swift language appears to have died down somewhat, based on two monthly programming language popularity indexes.

The Tiobe Index for August had Swift dropping to its 23rd most-popular language; Swift was was ranked 16th in its first appearance in the index last month. In the PyPL Index of Language Popularity, Swift came in 11th place this month; it was slotted in the 10th spot in July. "I expect Swift to slow down a bit in popularity for a couple of months. This was just the initial hype," said Paul Jansen, managing director at Tiobe. "After that it will regain its popularity to an even higher level."

Tiobe assess language popularity through a formula that looks at searches pertaining to each language on sites such as Google, Bing, Wikipedia, and Yahoo. Ratings are based the number of engineers, courses, and third-party vendors pertinent to a language. PyPL analyzes the frequency of language tutorial searches in Google. Swift in the Tiobe index had a 0.668 percent rating this month, down from a 1.054 percent rating in July. In PyPL, Swift's share was 2.7 percent; it had a 3 percent share last month.