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Poll: What's Your Most Disliked Programming Language?

news.ycombinator.com

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

#241

Post by pbiggar »

zaphar wrote: post #226
duskwuff wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Its been there a long time, I think since PHP 5. (Certainly, it was old in 2008, when I was working on PHP).

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

#242

Post by jeltz »

mst wrote: post #222
jcheng wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

PHP is not much good for security though for beginner developers. It does not help with XSS, CSRF, or SQL injection prevention. If anything it does actually encourage them if you do not know of the risks.

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

#244

Post by wizzard »

pepijndevos wrote: post #136
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…

I once found a login form where 1e3 was a correct password, when yours was 1000. I'm still not sure if it eval'd your password, but it was PHP for sure.

What does this have to do with faults of the language? I can think of a lot of stupid things to do in any language; it doesn't mean the language is the problem.

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

#245

Post by poloniculmov »

pak wrote: post #208
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'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 ru…

I don't know what the state of Delphi is now, but I remember there was a good community around it 6-7 years ago, plenty of Open Source components that filled the gaps in the VCL.

And back in the day, when .net was awkward to use and Java was too slow, Delphi was the king of RAD. Unfortunately they didn't even try to keep up with .net/Java, for example, proper Unicode support wasn't added until Delphi 2009.

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

#246

Post by loup-vaillant »

I Chose C++ because it's the language which makes me suffer the most. Besides the existence of legacy code and currently available expertise, this language is totally inappropriate for the work I'm currently doing. Also, I suspect C++ is the language that cause the most suffering among programmers, partly because it is so widely used in the first place.

As for why I hate it so much, the arguments are well known: the language is overly complex, not very consistent, generally unsafe with regards to exceptions and memory management, and widely used for applications that could have used a garbage collector. C++11 solves parts of this, if your team observe very clean coding conventions, and at the price of an even more complex language.

For my favourite language, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3747696 (The current answer is OCaml, but I now know of another approach that looks orders of magnitude better.)

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

#247

Post by prodigal_erik »

zaphar wrote: post #231
esrauch wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be surprised if it happened more than usual with PHP, but in my experience programmers always curse the language/framework/api that they use heavily. You always learn the seams and hit issues with the design if you work with something for long enough.

Yep, It's a phenomenon frequently called "using in anger". The interesting thing about php is you don't have to use it very long before you use it in anger. Most of the time you can tell if someone is well versed in a language if they use it in anger. With PHP all you can tell is they've used it.

Is that was "use in anger" means? I had assumed it came from "fire a shot in anger", meaning serious use rather than practice or ceremony.

It's true that most software makes me either angry or sad, but PHP (where even "==" is wrong after Perl had gotten it right) was a singularly memorable peek into Special Hell.

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

#249

Post by guard-of-terra »

zanny wrote: post #235
guard-of-terra wrote: post #139

Some comments on popular choices: I chose C++ because it's a horrible language that holds a lot of industry hostage. You can't use anything else because of tooling and network effect, but writing C++ is painful and dangerous. A few years ago I would use PHP because it's so horrible and it destroyed a lot of innocent souls who entered programming via it, forever damaging their understanding of consistency, abstraction…

I still would rather have web browsers say "can't find an interpreter for type=ruby" than be stuck with javascript. Thats why I voted javascript, because in every other case, I have a choice - the languages I dislike, I dislike less because I can just not use them. No the case with JS.

The main problem is the DOM and event binding. Do you want to refit ruby to play nice along with browser model?

Problem is, surprisingly, nobody does! And the sandboxing would be huge too.

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

#250

Post by aviraldg »

I voted for PHP - it was the first "web" language I ever learnt.

I'm not going to hate on it for all its foibles, like the $ before variables and the jumble of functions that constitute its standard library which totally lacks any and all kinds of namespacing.

The real reason behind why I hate it, is because as a newbie, it let me do things that are now, in hindsight, terrible practices. Things like including mixing code and markup outright, placing source in public facing directories, and not to mention the myriad PHP tutorials which encourage handling paths using simple concatenation.

A better language, I feel, is one that 'pushes' against things that are wrong, and makes them harder to do.

I'd also have voted for Java if I could, for no other reason than its verbosity.

ps. If you're wondering, I like Python most.

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