Top Programming Languages of 2025

Where is Swift? And can it even be listed reliably considering all the published Swift code that is just broken due to the language “evolution”?

The top languages are almost entirely:
- Platform independent
- Have large ecosystems of packages/frameworks/libraries
- Compose well with LLMs

Apple lost a decade hyperfocused on Swift while everyone else won devs.

Sanity checks:
- 2025 December TIOBE index: Swift doesn't even crack the top 20.
- 2025 Stack Overflow survey: Swift sits at 20 for most popular languages.

Everyone else is vibing, doing cross-plat, achieving velocity.

Swift is like "you *might* be able to write a quadratic equation and compile it in under 5 minutes *next year*". There's no future for it.

> Sanity checks:
- 2025 December TIOBE index: Swift doesn't even crack the top 20.

At its peak ObjC was #3. Objc will ultimately outlive Swift.

Retired developer here. I now only code with Swift, barely tried ObjC. Professionally did everything from Assembler, COBOL-74, VB, C#, ABAP and dabbled in RPG once. HTML (including when HTML5 was introduced), JavaScript, CSS also.

Swift (to me) was more "fun" than really anything I mentioned. It doesn't require the +/- and multiple files like header/method that ObjC does. It's not comparable to C# IMHO but is clearly better than COBOL or ABAP (is NetWeaver still around?), and what little I remember about RPG it had at least one thing - it was better than SwiftUI.

I agree, SwiftUI, which is not to be confused with Swift, is not only platform-specific, it is being forced down everyone's throat by Apple. That said, let's talk about the OP link:

(1) The article starts with the heading "Octoverse, a New Developer joins GitHub Every Second as AI Leads TypeScript to #1". In order to get to the "Top Programming Languages of 2025", you'll need to literally wade through a few dozen paragraphs (from an article posted/dated Noevember 7!) about AI, GitHub, more GitHub (36 million joined in the last year), even more GitHub (including graphics about the last year), before *any* mention about languages, and then it's that in August it overtook Pythion and JavaScript. You need to scroll much further (past a few more graphics about GitHub and how it growth was in 2025, CoPilot and it's steep growth, and - of course - GitHub and it's "key numbers", developer activity on GitHub before *finally getting to this "top 20 list" of languages *on Github*!

(2) Sorry, I forgot to mention you have to scroll further for that - past something about AI agent going mainstream, vibe coding (is that a language?), listings of the top countries who use GitHub, even more about the global use and what changed in 2025 (remember this was published in early November), "Open source' (I put it in quotes because I used to call it OSS and always thought it was "Open Source" with a capital S), fastest growing "open source" projects on GitHub... are you getting this yet? If not look at the URL - it's GitHub blog.

So what we have is maybe the best snapshot. At least as one can have. I could have gone on for, well, a few thousand more words before actually getting to this list of top 20 programming languages in 2025. And it's not! It's simply the top 20 for GitHub!

The main coding lines are from companies that don't post their source code on GitHub. JavaScript and Python are languages that primarily are used for browser activity, be it executed in the browser or on a remote sever. C# posted on GitHub is very overwhelmed by proprietary code that will never get to GitHub.

Where does this leave Swift? (Not SwiftUI, that may share the name but is not Open Source and is only used by Apple.) Probably not in the top 20 - I wouldn't know because I could find this list. (It listed 5, then 10 in a graphic).

I'd love to see something about ObjC. Even in these comments! This isn't a knock on the language! I think once you strip away 90% of this GitHub post (about 50% of this is about AI) you won't find a single mention of Swift *nor* ObjC. So if it peaked at #3, I'll take your word for it @Objc4Life - and no offense, I always thought it was ObjC :-)! If Objective-C started with NeXT (hopefully that's correct) and peaked at #3, say in 2005 (supposedly GitHub was around by then) then we are talking what, Next & Apple, and 20+ years.

Swift? (Again, please, not this abomination called SwiftUI - you might as well talk LiquidGlass. It's Apple-only.) The language is expanding, Open Source (in ways), and appears to be the main language used by one of the top 3 (as opposed to this supposed top 20 list I simply could not find)... and it's been only 11 years. And yes, some would say it's evolved too fast.

@Dave I was referring to TIOBE index mentioned by Hammer. No need to take my word for it https://www.infoworld.com/article/2290771/apples-popularity-boosts-objective-c-language-past-c.html

“Objective-C, the language used for developing applications to run on Apple’s mobile devices, was ranked the third most-popular language in the July edition of the Tiobe Programming Community Index, followed by C++ in fourth place.”

> I always thought it was ObjC

When I type comments on this little iPhone keyboard sometimes I end up with Objc and I don’t usually bother to “fix” lol

What I think would be a more interesting is learning about what programming languages developers *wish* they could be programming in. Every single language mentioned here feels to me like it has serious compromises. I still use a lot of Objective-C, but boy if the syntax isn't overly verbose and weird, and boy do I get tired of writing header files.

This year I really delved into writing Clojure, and while I wouldn't necessarily choose it for any old project, and my C-trained brain still wants to write imperative code, after seeing what sorts of features the language has -- real macros! -- and how *incredibly* stable it is -- libraries from over a decade ago still work, and it has a culture of NOT breaking APIs, fancy that! -- it makes me really pine for a more C-like programming language that has those same features and benefits.

TypeScript is great -- the main drawback being that you have to compile (transpile) it before it can run under Node.js or in a browser.

But this has changed recently, with Node.js adding some native TypeScript support, and Apple unintentionally staying in the game with Bun, which is a Node.js-compatible runtime based on JavaScriptKit. Bun’s an open source project that is popular because it’s very fast (thanks to JavaScriptKit and LLVM), has full built-in TypeScript support, and can be used as a drop-in replacement for Node.js. Apple should have leveraged this, and taken it over as they did with LLVM, but they were once again asleep at the wheel. Anthropic got there first, and now owns Bun.

"what programming languages developers *wish* they could be programming in."

I thoroughly enjoy Kotlin recently. Java's huge, mature ecosystem + a modern, nice programming language.

> I still use a lot of Objective-C, but boy if the syntax isn't overly verbose and weird, and boy do I get tired of writing header files.

I don't - it serves as documentation IMO you are supposed to do this even if your language doesn't have headers - ObjC just basically forces you to). In Swift I find a gigantic single file with the private and public API together to be difficult to sort through. "Generating a Header" in Swift is very slow (when it works).

Last time I jumped to definition in a Swift only framework I found that there was one generated header file for the ENTIRE framework which seems pretty insane.

---
But just to add to my previous comment ObjC was number 3 in TIOBE 2012. People forget but at that time developers were praising ObjC. The blogger/tutorial community went all in on Swift because new programming language means they can write a new book, release a new class and make money. But before Swift there were efforts to copy ObjC and make it cross platform.

There was Cappuccino https://www.cappuccino.dev/learn/objective-j.html
There was also Apportable to make using it on Android easier.

People even called for using it on the web (again): https://kevinlawler.com/objective-c

But then came Swift two years later. The popularity of both ObjC plummeted and Swift has never come close. If Apple continued to improve ObjC and never introduced Swift ObjC would still probably be in the top 3 - and there would be people complaining about those square brackets but they would suck it up.

@ObjC4Life

> If Apple continued to improve ObjC and never introduced Swift ObjC would still probably be in the top 3 - and there would be people complaining about those square brackets but they would suck it up.

Bingo. Apple wasted a decade on a bad language because it was the new shiny. Just another example of out of touch executives at Apple in that decade.