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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?

#101

Post by twunde »

billpg wrote: post #84

PHP. There are worse languages, but PHP is hard to avoid. I want to do some simple automation on a website. Because I don't like PHP, I have to pay a premium for a Windows based host that supports ASP.NET.

For next time, there are multiple languages such as Python, Perl, Ruby, Java etc that could do the automation and not have to use Windows. And granted about PHP. The big problem it has is its inconsistency in terms of function parameters. Slows the developer right down.

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

#102

Post by pgroves »

mtkd wrote: post #67
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…

You can't ignore context. Fortran is a very strong language for a specific application - you can't compare it to Javascript. Delphi was a framework using Pascal. It was a revolution at the time - and you can see it's influence in many software tools available today. You could argue that the current SQL/Rails API/JSON/Backbone/JQuery/CoffeeScript/HTML/CSS abomination we've created could be improved or replaced with so…

I wish there was some way to vote for that abomination in the poll. Personally, writing Java/Html hybrid templates that are served as html documents and then further manipulated by dynamically altering the DOM in javascript on the client is the stupidest programming style I can imagine.

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

#103

Post by natesm »

alextgordon wrote: post #92
wsc981 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My only complaint would be how hacked on Core Animation is in comparison with UIKit. For example, WebView doesn't like having a layer, but this isn't mentioned anywhere in the documentation:

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/...

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

#104

Post by chrisaycock »

AnthonBerg wrote: post #6

That stuff that is used in Autotools, ugh ... What did they call it? M4 I think?

Yeah, most people know M4 from Autotools, which is a poor use of it really. M4 was created by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the same team that created C. So there was some expertise behind its design. I've only use it for assembly programming, where is was very handy. But yeah, Autotools is probably why most people hate it.

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

#107

Post by jd »

I didn't see my option on the list. My dislike for the abomination that makefiles are made of knows no bounds. Most of the languages above I can avoid (I simply don't use the languages I don't like), but I curse every time I have to open a makefile, because I know how painful it's going to be.

(makefiles are turing complete, so I think it qualifies as a programming language)

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

#109

Post by omgtehlion »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #47

Easily C# and Java, I don't think the virtual machine adds anything other than another abstraction layer to get in the way. Just because code is native doesn't mean you can't have all sorts of built in bounds checking to ensure safety, but when you're in a VM, taking off the training wheels when you need to actually make shit fast is such a pain. I especially don't understand the point of a VM like the CLR that only…

I have had the same experience with C++. But it is not the language’s fault. It is people who use it and call themselves “architects” who know shitload of “patterns” and “good practices”, and make all these unnecessary abstractions and distractions.
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