The stock price of Apple Inc (AAPL) has risen over 1.34% today in the early morning trading session. Since the open on Wednesday, the stock has gone up over 2.58%. The stock closed at $176.94 on Thursday.


Apple’s programming language Swift is less than four years old, but a new report finds that it’s already as popular as its predecessor; Apple’s more established Objective-C language.

Swift is now tied with Objective-C at number 10 in the rankings conducted by analyst firm RedMonk. It’s hardly a surprise that programmers are interested in Apple’s language, which can be used to build applications for the iPhone, Apple Watch, Macintosh computers, and even web applications. But the speed at which it jumped in the ranks is astonishing. Swift is the fastest growing language RedMonk has seen since it started compiling these rankings in 2011. Even Go, a programming language that Google released in 2009, hasn’t been able to break into the top 10.


The second fastest grower is Kotlin, which Google now officially supports on Android. It leaped from number 46 in the third quarter of 2017 to number 27 in January.

RedMonk’s rankings don’t necessarily reflect whether companies are using these languages for real-world projects, or how many jobs are available for developers who know them. Instead, the firm tries to gauge how interested programmers are in these languages. Popularity among programmers could influence business decisions such as what languages to use for new projects.

RedMonk compiles its rankings by looking at the number of questions people ask about each language on the question and answer site Stack Overflow as well as the number of projects using particular languages on the code hosting and collaboration site GitHub. The methodology was originally created by data scientists Drew Conway and John Myles White in 2010.

Apple first released Swift in 2014. The idea was not just to make it easier for new developers to learn to program, but to simplify life for experienced coders as well. Many languages over the years have aimed to smooth the programming process by offering syntax that’s easier to read or building in features that programmers otherwise commonly write from scratch. But these sorts of languages often produced applications that ran more slowly than ones written in more difficult programming languages. Swift aimed to combine programmer-friendly features with performance.
