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Poll: What's Your Most Disliked Programming Language?

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271–280 of 366 posts

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

#271
Bash — language where even spaces are dangerous.

It's frustrating that in shell scripting gap between "looks correct" and "is correct" is enormous.

Whitespace, leading hyphens, paths, globs, shopts, masks, signals, race conditions and POSIX compat problems and quirks — there's always some edge case.

Even `echo` can't output arbitrary values in a portable fashion (sometimes accepts `-n`, but doesn't accept `--`).

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

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not know why someone has downvoted zxy. He/she has the point: python is used by many but few dislike it. Python is a third kind: the ones people like. Bjarne was looking for excuses for his bad C++.

I don't know, I know a ton of people who don't like Python. The difference is that unlike C or C++ or even Java, if you don't like the language itself there is no compelling reason to use Python, and so those people don't. That said, when people do have to use Python, like in my compilers class right now, quite a lot are not happy with it. (Even the professor gets annoyed with it; I really don't know why we're using…

Yes, that could explain off some differences between python and C++ in these two polls, but right now, over 95% python voters favor it as opposed to about 50% for C++. I can hardly believe your argument alone can explain off this huge difference. Also, look at C and C#. A lot of programmers are forced to use them, too, but they seem to like them better than C++ at least in the HN community. On the other hand, I agree that Python may not be the best choice for a course on the compiler theory. I am sure more would hate python if they were asked to develop a linux kernel with python.

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

#275
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

You're correct. Type hinting was introduced with PHP 5, which makes it about eight years old.

http://php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.typehinting.php

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

#277
post #217
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…

I don't know if this counts as meeting, but I consider myself a developer that is interested in programming, doing things right, etc., and I like PHP.

I see PHP as a language comparable to English. Both languages have a bunch of inconsistencies, peculiar idiosyncrasies, a humongous base of speakers/users, etc. In both languages, a lot of what people write is not of high quality, but writing high-quality stuff is certainly possible. If I had to choose one language for the world to speak, it probably wouldn't be English, and if I had to choose one programming language to be used in a given field (say, server-side web development), it probably wouldn't be PHP. But given the reality of the situation, PHP, like English, is an incredibly useful language, and PHP code, like English writing, can be of very high quality. I think this makes it a very valuable language.

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

#278
post #107

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)

There's a great story I heard years ago about makefile syntax. As I recall it: Stu Feldman, who invented 'make' at Bell Labs in the early days of Unix, realized fairly quickly that the syntax was a disaster. He decided not to try to fix it, though, because he already had ten users.

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

#279
post #242
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel like this is more of a role for a framework built on top of PHP than for a language like PHP itself. PHP itself is pretty low-level. How would you suggest providing better protection against these?

In the past, of course, PHP did have magic_quotes, which was a misguided attempt at mitigating SQL injections. This has since been removed, and there's been a big push in the direction of using prepared statements/parameterized queries through a library like PDO, which I think was introduced in PHP 5.

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

#280
post #123
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brainfuck has the goal of being a bad language.

The goal of brainfuck is to be as minimal as possible. Being bad is just a side effect of that. If you want a language that was designed to be bad look at Malbolge or INTERCAL.

After looking at those I take back anything bad I ever said about Brainfuck (and also C++).
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