It’s taken less than a year for Apple’s Swift programming language to take the top spot as the “most loved” language among developers.
Some 78 percent of programmers currently working with Swift were eager to continue developing with it, according to Stack Overflow’s 2015 Developer Survey. The data was collected from over 26,000 Stack Overflow visitors in 157 countries, though not all of those respondents were Swift users.
The most recent version of the language, Swift 1.2, was released alongside the iOS 8.3 update.
Swift’s older sibling, Objective-C, did not make the top ten list. However, the survey showed Objective-C developers were tops when it came to average pay, raking in – with bonuses – just under $99,000 per year.
The “Most Dreaded” languages or technologies list saw Salesforce in first, with 73.2%, Visual Basic in second with 72%, and WordPress taking third with 38.2%. Matlab and Sharepoint filled out the top five.
Among those respondents who identified themselves as full-time developers, 33% worked primarily on iOS apps, while 45% worked mostly on the Android platform, with 20% going bi-platform.
Apple’s OS X platform took second place for desktop operating systems, with 21.5% up from 20.3% in 2014, coming in behind Microsoft Windows 7 with 39% of the vote, and ahead of Linux’s 21% share.
