Though there’s often little movement at the top of TIOBE’s monthly programming language rankings, there’s always some interesting movement outside of the top eight spots. Now it seems Swift is positioning itself to become a permanent member of this list's top ten. SQL was added earlier this year after becoming Turing complete, and shot into the TIOBE top ten with ease. Other languages such as Java, Python, .NET, and various C language variants dominate that upper echelon. With the addition of SQL, this leaves the number-ten spot open for an upstart language. From TIOBE:

The top 9 of programming languages in the TIOBE index is quite stable now for some time, but the number 10 position is changing almost every month. This month Swift is trying to become a permanent member of the TIOBE index top 10. In the recent past Ruby and Perl were fighting for this position but they both seem to have had their best time.

As TIOBE goes on to note, Swift isn’t a sure bet to stick in its current slot, as many developers are looking for broader-based platforms such as React that allow them to write once and deploy across multiple arenas. R and Go are also contenders, but Python is sniping some of the synergy from R of late, which will likely reinforce R’s position as a lesser-used language. TIOBE is also walking back its love of Go; after being named the ‘programming language of the year’ in 2016, TIOBE now writes: “For the Go programming language, it is unclear what makes it stand out when compared to other programming languages.” It’s not the first time Swift has cracked TIOBE’s top ten (that was March 2017). In October 2017, TIOBE said Swift was in decline because developers were forced to migrate between Objective-C and Swift within the same codebase. That’s changing, but we’re not sold that Swift will become a top-ten mainstay just yet.