Swift Exploding, Monkchips flying, Imma Let You Finish

It’s been a while since we created any new Opinionated Infrastructure videos, which is a mistake. I feel that the series, gonzo though it is, represents some of the best work I have ever done in terms of immediacy and being engaging while talking about tech stuff. I was pretty happy therefore when IBM’s Mobile First group proposed that I got back in the game. I love to share stories and this commission comes at a good time. I want to do a fair bit more in solid video work this year, and we’re working on a site redesign to encourage that.

Next week is Mobile World Congress, a huge event which keeps getting bigger – because mobile is eating the world. As a marker consider that last year IBM CEO Ginni Rometty didn’t attend IBM Interconnect, but went to MWC instead. But that’s the business level conversation. What about developers? RedMonk’s regular programming language rankings {just updated!] show Apple’s new programming language SWIFT exploding – it’s one of the fastest growing technologies we’ve ever seen in terms of developer mindshare. More on that shortly.

Anyway we made this video, but totally forgot the most important thing – references to Taylor Swift.

note to self. if you reference @SwiftLang in a video and you don't reference @taylorswift13 then you are a. doing it wrong b. doing it wrong

— Grumble Bundle (@monkchips) February 19, 2016

Sorry for not being a Millennial. But I am pretty happy with how it came out anyway. I hope you enjoy it. And- did you know that IBM is leading a server-side SWIFT initiative, so you can run in on Ubuntu, and has this cool sandbox to play with?

update – for more reckons on rankings, while i was posting here, Stephen said this:

“Swift: Swift’s meteoric has predictably slowed as it’s entered the Top 20, but importantly has not stopped. For this ranking, Swift moves up one spot from #18 to #17. As always, growth is more difficult the closer you get to the top, and in passing Matlab, Swift now finds itself a mere two spots behind Go – in spite of being five years younger. It is also three spots behind Scala and only four behind R. Which means that Swift finds itself ranked alongside languages of real popularity and traction, and is within hailing distance of our Tier 1 languages (R is the highest ranking Tier 2). The interesting thing is that Swift still has the potential to move significantly; its current traction was achieved in spite of being a relatively closed alternative amongst open source alternatives. Less than four weeks before we took this quarter’s snapshot of data, Swift was finally open sourced by Apple, which means that the full effect of this release won’t be felt until next quarter’s ranking. This release was important for developers, who typically advantage open source runtimes at the expense of proprietary alternatives, but also because it allows third parties to feel comfortable investing in the community in a way they would not for a proprietary stack – see IBM’s enthusiastic embrace of Swift. This means that Swift has, uniquely, multiple potential new engines for growth. So it will be interesting indeed to see what impact the release has on Swift overall adoption, and whether it can propel it near or actually into the Top 10.”