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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?

#221

Post by [deleted] »

TylerE wrote: post #214
bhickey wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

With fairness, no you can't, not truly. Please point me to the version of HM the works with inheritance. Plus, due to stuff like __getattr__, the interpreter may not know until the method is called if it even exists. It would be totally possible in python to write a class where when any arbitrary method is called on a class, a function is randomly generated and called, with a random number of arguments, etc. It doesn…

[deleted]

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

#222

Post by mst »

jcheng wrote: post #217
ticks wrote: 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.

> I'm not that interested in programming, so I think it's a great language I think this sums up everyone I've met who actually likes PHP. They like that they are able to get stuff done, and look no further. It is just frustrating to those of us who know that PHP is one of the most poorly designed (and I use that word loosely) languages ever to be successful. If you can get over the local maximum of getting stuff done…

Rasmus basically said he doesn't care if he copies and pastes stuff around so long as it gives him the end result he wanted. The language reflects that.

And, actually, it's NOT necessarily a bad thing to have a language oriented around people who don't actually care that much about programming when it's also oriented around people who want to ship something useful to an end user (who might care if it's insecure but doesn't care if the code's pretty).

I've encountered a number of orgs now that have PHP on the front speaking XMLRPC or JSONRPC or whatever to a backend daemon (either Java or Perl in the cases I've seen) and since that means messiness on the front end shouldn't be able to violate business rules, it works out really well.

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

#224

Post by lubutu »

bhickey wrote: post #196
lubutu wrote: 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…

Well, duck typing can still be statically checked, so I'd argue that dynamic typing is more misguided. That said, I do agree that duck typing is fundamentally flawed. I think swans actually don't quack, they honk, but so does a car. Here we can see a problem with both synonymous and homonymous verbs.

I think it comes down to namespacing: we use modules to prevent naming conflicts, allowing us to compose two modules, but if we do the same with objects their attributes conflict. In Haskell everything has a namespace — there are no methods, only functions — and type classes provide polymorphism without (henceforth) 'quack conflicts'.

Two terrible examples of quack conflicts from the Python standard library are '+' meaning both "add" and "append" (the latter being non-commutative), and the comparison operators '=', '>' actually meaning ⊂, ⊆, ⊇, ⊃ when dealing with sets.

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

#226

Post by zaphar »

duskwuff wrote: post #203
zaphar wrote: 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.

Is that new? I don't remember it from my php days. Although I'll freely admit those days were a long long time ago so "new" for me may actually be pretty old.

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

#227

Post by Kilimanjaro »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #216
mangoman wrote: post #212

I'm so confused about why C is so liked, while C++ is so disliked. I mean everything you can do in C you can do in C++...Is it because C++ is too high-level for the work that C is primarily used for, and too low level for applications that are better suited for something like Java or Python? I'm a C++ hacker by education, its the language I'm strongest in. It definitely has flaws, but I DEFINITELY enjoy it over C.

Here's one answer to that: https://lwn.net/Articles/249460/

"The fact that we also piss off people who cannot see that is just a big additional advantage."

I like Linus.

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

#228

Post by bhickey »

lubutu wrote: post #224
bhickey wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, duck typing can still be statically checked, so I'd argue that dynamic typing is more misguided. That said, I do agree that duck typing is fundamentally flawed. I think swans actually don't quack, they honk , but so does a car. Here we can see a problem with both synonymous and homonymous verbs. I think it comes down to namespacing: we use modules to prevent naming conflicts, allowing us to compose two modules,…

Sorry for conflating duck typing with dynamic typing. I appreciate the correction!

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

#229

Post by zaphar »

esrauch wrote: post #176
zaphar wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Facebook uses a lot of PHP and seems to do fine, just because a language allows you to write horrible code doesn't necessarily mean it can't be used to write good code. PHP obviously has a lot of warts, but I think the bigger problem is that it gives you just enough rope to hang yourself.

Facebook also uses a very restricted subset of php for a lot of it, if the people I've met from over there are any indication. This may make it generally more useful for them than it may normally be.

I think they have to use that subset so it can be compiled by HipHop down to C code.

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

#230

Post by TylerE »

bhickey wrote: post #219
TylerE wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With fairness, no you can't, not truly. Please point me to the version of HM the works with inheritance. Plus, due to stuff like __getattr__, the interpreter may not know until the method is called if it even exists. It would be totally possible in python to write a class where when any arbitrary method is called on a class, a function is randomly generated and called, with a random number of arguments, etc. It doesn…

I never said inheritance, or method for that matter. You can do H-M on typeclasses. Philip Wadler has a paper on it and it's alive and well in GHC: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/topics/type-classes.htm... The fact that Python allows you to do something absurd is simply an argument against its design. Edit: Uh oh, looks like I ruffled some snakeskin!

The point is you can't just bolt on H-M to a typical scripting language and expect it to work, like, at all. It's a pretty huge sea change, and it would warp the underlying language to the point where you'd just end up with some of non-lazy, non-pure Haskell.
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