2021年4月编程语言排行榜（TIOBE Index for April 2021）

April Headline: Game over for Objective-C

It took much longer than expected. Programming language Objective-C has slipped out of the TIOBE index top 20 this month and it is not very likely that it will return in the short term. About 10 years ago, Objective-C was the rising star in the TIOBE index, being winner of the language of the year award in 2011 and 2012. Apple's iPhones were starting to boom in these days and all its applications were written in Objective-C.

Objective-C's fame came to a sudden stop when, in 2014, Apple announced that there was a new language called Swift that should replace Objective-C. Remarkably, it took a long time before Swift was more popular than Objective-C. Only 7 years after its death sentence, Objective-C is now leaving the top 20. But there is still hope for Objective-C because old languages sometimes strike back. Take a look at Fortran! This dinosaur is back in the top 20 after more than 10 years. Fortran was the first commercial programming language ever, and is gaining popularity thanks to the massive need for (scientific) number crunching. Welcome back Fortran.

The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. It is important to note that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be found here.