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Poll: What's Your Most Disliked Programming Language?

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Re: Poll: What's Your Most Disliked Programming Language?

#91

Post by fleitz »

gamache wrote: post #64
crntaylor wrote: post #37

I don't expect that the responses to this will be enlightening. In fact, I can predict right now that the winner of this poll will be the most commonly-used language which isn't widely considered to be "nice". Depending on the precise demographics of this site, that's either going to be Java, C++ or Javascript, despite the fact that there are clearly worse languages out there (Fortran, COBOL, Brainfuck...) The reason…

I refute that Fortran is axiomatically worse than Java. I've spent a few years working in each, so I got to know them decently well. Fortran is like C with great math support; that is to say, C is like Fortran with great systems facilities. In each language's domain, it is more expressive and more performant than Java. Outside its domain, you don't want a bad programmer going near it for too long, but you can absolut…

The issue is that both C (portable assembler) and Fortran (portable math library) solve some problem pretty well.

What problem is it that Java solves well? That is what makes java such a shitty language to program in, for any particular problem you encounter there are much better languages to solve that problem in, C# comes to mind immediately as to what Java should be.

Note: Yes I realize that Java has excellent cross platform support and a huge ecosystem, but we're talking about languages, not the ecosystem.

Re: Poll: What's Your Most Disliked Programming Language?

#92

Post by alextgordon »

wsc981 wrote: post #71
hboon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which APIs do you dislike? I think Apple's Cocoa and Cocoa touch frameworks are some of the best. Cocoa is old and less polished, but Cocoa touch is pretty awesome.

I'd agree on Cocoa Touch, but Cocoa seems like a mess to me. I hope Apple will clean up the Cocoa API at some point in the future ...

In what way? I find AppKit to be extremely well designed. It has warts, but it's by far the best UI toolkit out there.

Re: Poll: What's Your Most Disliked Programming Language?

#95

Post by andersh »

icebraining wrote: post #59
crntaylor wrote: post #37

I don't expect that the responses to this will be enlightening. In fact, I can predict right now that the winner of this poll will be the most commonly-used language which isn't widely considered to be "nice". Depending on the precise demographics of this site, that's either going to be Java, C++ or Javascript, despite the fact that there are clearly worse languages out there (Fortran, COBOL, Brainfuck...) The reason…

Brainfuck is not a bad language, it just has different goals. Esoteric languages in general can't be compared with general purpose languages designed to be useful.

Brainfuck has the goal of being a bad language.

Re: Poll: What's Your Most Disliked Programming Language?

#96

Post by Tichy »

emehrkay wrote: post #90

I am surprised by ActionScript being high on the list. It gives you everything that is very decent about JavaScript, with the classical OO that everyone seems to love. If you do any Java or Python, you should be able to get right into AS

That sounds weird, given that Java and Python are almost antitheses of each other. So ActionScript somehow manages to meet two entirely different philosophies in the middle?

Re: Poll: What's Your Most Disliked Programming Language?

#98

Post by Tichy »

xpapad wrote: post #69
sharmajai wrote: post #62

I think for a language to be disliked it should be in one of the following categories: 1) First category is where you are forced to use it, and it is easy enough to get started in. For these languages the programmer base is big enough for the mandatory awkward features of the language be stumbled onto frequently enough to gather all the hate, and also big enough for the language hating to become a pop culture. Javasc…

I hate Python with a passion I cannot express or explain.

I don't hate it, but I hate it's growing popularity. It is the little things, for example functions like len() that should really not be standalone but belong to string or array or whatever (I am not that deep into python). Or the the crippled lambda.

To me it is roughly equivalent to JavaScript - both have some syntactic sugar that the other doesn't have. But JavaScript has full power lambda and is overall much more elegant in my opinion (in the sense of needing less concepts to achieve more - basically it is all hash maps and functions).

Perhaps CoffeeScript is the solution, haven't really tried it...

Re: Poll: What's Your Most Disliked Programming Language?

#99

Post by mechanical_fish »

I see that another generation has discovered HN's poll feature. ;)

The pleasure of watching the old classics come back for another run is tempered by the fact that what has come back is yet another language war.

Oh, well. My favorite least-favorite programming language is the Central Dogma. Gotos. Self-modifying code. Code that deliberately recompiles other people's code. A potentially infinite series of build steps. Not intuitive to read. The output often makes no sense. Very few comments. Nobody seems to have written a manual. And the bootstrap process takes a really long time.

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