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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?

#201
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to stop worrying and learn to love the bomb ;p In all seriousness, I feel that a lot of people(me included) go through a period of hate for javascript until they find that it's actually has some impressive expressiveness using very small set of things.

I definitely have a very strong love / hate relationship with javascript. On one hand, you can be very expressive with Javascript and it absolutely can be an incredibly flexible language with a lot of power. On the other hand, there's a LOT of warts in the language. Random reserved words like 'class' that don't even fit the language's approach, variable scoping that can very easily bite you in the ass if you don't kn…

Yeah I agree on a lot of the points you mentioned. Block scoping would have been better in my view also. But there are tools, like in other languages, to ease that pain. I never forget a semicolon due to using js2-mode which makes missing semicolons stand out. JSLint and other tools of the sort help find bad code too. And the in browser tools like the Chrome dev tools with a debugger,tracing,console really make it much easier.

Javascript without the tools would be a real pain.

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

#202
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think fortran77 should have been listed separately. Any language that requires six spaces at the start of the line in order to maintain legacy punchcard compliance makes me gag. fortran90 or hpf on the other hand are pretty useful in their domain.

In general when people hate on Fortran I assume it's because they had to deal with f77. 90/95/2003 aren't perfect or anything but aren't generally offensive.

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

#203
post #133

I chose PHP because it's gathers everything I hate about any language in one spot. * It has everything including the kitchen sink but nothing in the decor matches. There is no unifying principle to help you grok the language * The Community is all about quick hacky fixes to already broken code and this approach seems to flow from the core developers out. * It's not type safe, not even at runtime. I don't know if I ev…

PHP actually does have some type safety, amazingly. You can declare types on function arguments:

    function myFunc(ObjectType $arg1, array $arg2) { ... }
And it'll throw errors if you try to pass an argument of the wrong type.

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

#204
post #142
post #133

I chose PHP because it's gathers everything I hate about any language in one spot. * It has everything including the kitchen sink but nothing in the decor matches. There is no unifying principle to help you grok the language * The Community is all about quick hacky fixes to already broken code and this approach seems to flow from the core developers out. * It's not type safe, not even at runtime. I don't know if I ev…

I think PHP's main problem on websites like these is that it's too mainstream of a language. It's like asking someone who's an avid fan of world cinema about the latest Michael Bay film. I'm not that interested in programming, so I think it's a great language. All those years back when first learning to use it, I remember going through a book and being so happy that it did practically everything itself.

Doesn't the fact that Python won the "Favorite Language" poll kind of show that it's not just about hating on mainstream languages? Python's pretty mainstream, I'd say... definitely top 10.

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

#205
post #145
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think PHP's main problem on websites like these is that it's too mainstream of a language. It's like asking someone who's an avid fan of world cinema about the latest Michael Bay film. I'm not that interested in programming, so I think it's a great language. All those years back when first learning to use it, I remember going through a book and being so happy that it did practically everything itself.

Your second statements communicates to me that you like it because it's a toy language. It may be useful for just getting something small done and getting started but for someone who looks at programming as an enjoyable craft php loses it's shine. Especially once you've been exposed to other languages that highlight how much better it could be.

What is the definition of "something small"? Millions of users and companies use PHP based software for various business needs, from small to big. Yes, the language has a lot of flaws, but I disagree that you can't create useful and rather "big" software with it. And it's easier compared to other languages. If it solves people problems, why not?

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

#206
post #4

The programming languages that would make me the most sad/angry/annoyed I don't use , so it's difficult to make a choice. I suppose I'll have to go with Javascript because it's the de facto 'Web language' which people use to force me to evaluate arbitrary code whenever I want to read anything on the Web. Even with a sandbox that seems a terrible idea. If we're talking about programming languages I hate but still use…

I'm going to sign in as a partisan here. I firmly believe that Python is the worst language that people actually use. DuckTyping is the most deeply misguided aspect of python. With the discover of Hindley-Milner type inference 40 and 30 years ago, this sort of sloth is simply inexcusable. Pythonistas will say "Oh, I don't care if it's a duck or a swan, as long as it quacks." Guess what? You can treat function calls a…

I enjoy Python's aesthetics and extensive libraries, but wish it had (practical) static type inference. (RPython isn't really practical.)

And to confuse matters, Python 3 added optional type annotations that are ignored by the runtime!

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

#208

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're actually not too far off on your assessment of Delphi. Compared with all the .NET languages that sprang up to replace it, it's painfully verbose, inexpressive, and starved for community support.

On the other hand, what it still does well, decade after decade, is pump a 30MB native standalone executable from millions of SLOC in minutes, one that will run on any Windows box without installing any libraries or runtimes. That is, in its own way, impressive. Many businesses still depend on it and instead of an OSS community you wind up licensing libraries from the few remaining dev shops.

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

#209
post #145
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think PHP's main problem on websites like these is that it's too mainstream of a language. It's like asking someone who's an avid fan of world cinema about the latest Michael Bay film. I'm not that interested in programming, so I think it's a great language. All those years back when first learning to use it, I remember going through a book and being so happy that it did practically everything itself.

Your second statements communicates to me that you like it because it's a toy language. It may be useful for just getting something small done and getting started but for someone who looks at programming as an enjoyable craft php loses it's shine. Especially once you've been exposed to other languages that highlight how much better it could be.

I spend a lot of my time writing Python, especially for Django powered sites, and writing client side javascript. Periodically, I'll get stuck maintaining large projects written entirely in PHP and miss the nice features from other languages. Javascript has its bug-a-boos, but with its dynamic design and jQuery, its easy to write clean code. Python is also much cleaner and usually just works.

On the other hand, all of my programming horror stories and terrible hacks have been written in PHP. I remember having to use an older version of PHP that failed to support closures when it was needed in some legacy code. The code was passing functions as arguments, but because the functions were not bound in the local scope, there were issues with namespace collisions. I had to resort to global variables for a situation that should not have needed it because rewriting everything properly required a non-trivial refactoring that I did not have the time to complete. Granted, this has been addressed in more recent versions of PHP, but there are always old versions floating around where "gotcha's" like this show up.

More recently, I ran into an issue porting PHP 5 code across different linux distributions where, for some strange reason, libraries on the include path failed to be found. Debugging something like that is ridiculously frustrating. Problems like this are bound to show up with any technology you use frequently, but my work involves using many languages and technologies and, of them, PHP is the only one that leads to these sorts of problems with such regularity.

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