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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?

#301

Post by seanmcdirmid »

andersh wrote: post #95
icebraining wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brainfuck is not a bad language, it just has different goals. Esoteric languages in general can't be compared with general purpose languages designed to be useful.

Brainfuck has the goal of being a bad language.

I would call Brainfuck (and other esoteric languages) as an instance of what "critical design" as described by Anthony Dunn. The goals of critical design are to produce artifacts that get you to think vs. "affirmative design" which is meant to create usable artifacts.

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

#303

Post by ElbertF »

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.

Type hinting exists for objects and arrays but not for scalar types (string, int, float, bool) unfortunately.

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

#304

Post by rbanffy »

jasonlotito wrote: post #300
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…

From another comments, we established a time frame: > 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. So, what you are really saying is: > I chose PHP because it's gathers everything I hate about any language in one spot when I last used it... which was a least 8 years ago.

I haven't seen an elegant pattern emerge from PHP in the last 8 years.

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

#305

Post by ataranto »

gnosis wrote: post #259
gnuvince wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yaron Minsky said in one of his talks that hiring OCaml programmers was the easiest thing in the world: he posted an ad on the mailing list, got 20 applications, 15 of which were worthy of a phone interview. Of those 15, 5 were asked to come in for an in-person interview and 3 of those were hired. Sure, he might not be able to hire 80 programmers in one batch, but I don't think Jane Street would need to do that, or t…

And, as an OCaml programmer, if you were not one of those lucky 3, where would you work other than Jane Street?

At the PHP shop.

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

#307

Post by rbanffy »

robomartin wrote: post #192
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…

What would you use in place of PHP to build a web app? The only requirement is that you have to be able to hire developers just as easily as you can hire PHP developers. This might be where rubber meets the road. It's easy to dislike a tool based on all kinds of criteria. In the real world one has to be able to get work done and, if needed, find developers to expand a team. Proposing a subjectively or objectively bet…

> The only requirement is that you have to be able to hire developers just as easily as you can hire PHP developers.

Would you trust your product to the kind of developer you can easily hire?

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

#309

Post by A1kmm »

robomartin wrote: post #192
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…

What would you use in place of PHP to build a web app? The only requirement is that you have to be able to hire developers just as easily as you can hire PHP developers. This might be where rubber meets the road. It's easy to dislike a tool based on all kinds of criteria. In the real world one has to be able to get work done and, if needed, find developers to expand a team. Proposing a subjectively or objectively bet…

Unless you have a very short term project, you shouldn't hire developers based on their knowledge of a particular language - it is far better to hire them based on their demonstrated skills that transcend particular programming languages or technologies (knowledge of multiple programming languages, track record developing software, computer science knowledge, knowledge of software engineering principles, and so on).

Developers can learn new languages if they need to.

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

#310

Post by IgorPartola »

esrauch wrote: post #193
Darmani wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two kinds of programmers at Facebook: The ones who curse PHP every work day, and the ones who don't use it. "This language really sucks." -- paraphrased, intro to PHP on Facebook's internal Wiki

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.

Nope! I love me some Python, JavaScript, C, and even ActionScrip, Java and Pascal. Blaming the tools is bad form unless you can prove they are bad, which can be done with PHP.
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