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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?

#331

Post by IgorPartola »

direllama wrote: post #326
IgorPartola wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The concept of "bad" is subjective and can't be proven. Don't blame the tools for what the people do with them.

Fair enough. Bad is too broad a term. But I think most developers agree that PHP is inconsistent and lacks type safety. For a long time it lacked namespaces which made for some really silly design patterns. It lacks some neat features too, like lambdas and its support for closures is minimal. The list can go on.

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

#332

Post by zaphar »

elimisteve wrote: post #311
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…

"Golang has been pleasing me lately although it's interfaces have a very tiny hole in the type safety." Go/Golang is indeed an amazing language -- my favorite, in fact, even beating out Python for my #1 spot. Go's creators guarantee its type safety; what hole do you speak of? To hopefully assuage your concerns and to make an assumption about what you may worry is a hole in Go's type safety... Empty interfaces allow o…

The interface{} is a contributor to the hole but not the cause.

The hole occurs when I want to make a generic container like say a binary tree. I can create a node interface that satisfies my needs for a binary tree. What I can't do is guarantee that at compile time every element in my container is of the type that I expect. If they ever add generics of some sort this hole will be closed. It's a very tiny one and can usually be limited to a single functions scope but it still exists and certainly not enough to make me dismiss the languange out of hand. You can see examples of the hole by looking at Go's container/* packages. Some of them had a completely separate implementation for each of the primitive types. Type assertions ensure type safety at runtime provided the programmer does their job. But it depends on the programmer doing their job so it could be better.

Go and ML were two examples that come the closest to my "ideal" language. Go just happens to be one that I have the greatest chance of actually using in a job :-)

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

#333

Post by whateverer »

jasonlotito wrote: post #298
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…

> I think this sums up everyone I've met who actually likes PHP. That says more about the people you associate with then with the language. The people I know care about programming, care about doing it well, care about elegant solutions, and care about a wonderful end product. What they don't care about are stupid language wars. > the grass actually IS greener in Python and Ruby land. I never got serious with Ruby, s…

> What they don't care about are stupid language wars. Then why don't you care about PHP's horrible design, implementation, and development team? I veer away from PHP, fearing very much the Broken Window effect from all the glass scattered in the ground around PHP all the time.

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

#335

Post by luriel »

zaphar wrote: post #332
elimisteve wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Golang has been pleasing me lately although it's interfaces have a very tiny hole in the type safety." Go/Golang is indeed an amazing language -- my favorite, in fact, even beating out Python for my #1 spot. Go's creators guarantee its type safety; what hole do you speak of? To hopefully assuage your concerns and to make an assumption about what you may worry is a hole in Go's type safety... Empty interfaces allow o…

The interface{} is a contributor to the hole but not the cause. The hole occurs when I want to make a generic container like say a binary tree. I can create a node interface that satisfies my needs for a binary tree. What I can't do is guarantee that at compile time every element in my container is of the type that I expect. If they ever add generics of some sort this hole will be closed. It's a very tiny one and can…

> You can see examples of the hole by looking at Go's container/*

container/* is a bit of a corner case which is rarely used, specially since append() was added to the language and container/vector was deprecated I can't remember the last time I needed anything from container/*.

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

#336

Post by georgefox »

jcheng wrote: post #319
jasonlotito wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think this sums up everyone I've met who actually likes PHP. That says more about the people you associate with then with the language. The people I know care about programming, care about doing it well, care about elegant solutions, and care about a wonderful end product. What they don't care about are stupid language wars. > the grass actually IS greener in Python and Ruby land. I never got serious with Ruby, s…

OK, how about I rephrase to: > I've never seriously learned a second language, so I think it's a great language Do the people you know have experience with other comparable* languages, and still think PHP is a well-designed language and platform? I concede that the PHP community, and PHP itself, has dramatically improved in the last few years. PHP 5 is a revelation compared to PHP 4. [*] i.e. not "The other language…

> Do the people you know have experience with other comparable languages, and still think PHP is a well-designed language and platform?

Is this the only thing upon which to base your opinion of a language? As someone who's seen at least a glimpse of the world beyond PHP, I'd concede that the design of the language, especially in earlier versions, is probably not its biggest selling point. But as you and I agreed below, PHP derives its value in other areas.

Maybe it's implicit in a question like "What's your most disliked programming language?" that those other areas should be excluded from consideration, but if that's not the case, then focusing solely on language design is a bit unfair to PHP.

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

#337

Post by fanf2 »

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 a Scala or an Erlang or a Clojure shop, I expect :-)

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

#338

Post by jasonlotito »

rbanffy wrote: post #304
jasonlotito wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Being blind isn't something to joke about. Mocking those with handicaps is rude and uncalled for.

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

#339

Post by jasonlotito »

georgefox wrote: post #336
jcheng wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, how about I rephrase to: > I've never seriously learned a second language, so I think it's a great language Do the people you know have experience with other comparable* languages, and still think PHP is a well-designed language and platform? I concede that the PHP community, and PHP itself, has dramatically improved in the last few years. PHP 5 is a revelation compared to PHP 4. [*] i.e. not "The other language…

> Do the people you know have experience with other comparable languages, and still think PHP is a well-designed language and platform? Is this the only thing upon which to base your opinion of a language? As someone who's seen at least a glimpse of the world beyond PHP, I'd concede that the design of the language, especially in earlier versions, is probably not its biggest selling point. But as you and I agreed belo…

> I'd concede that the design of the language, especially in earlier versions, is probably not its biggest selling point.

Keep in mind, the design of the language wasn't to create a new language, but instead, make using various libraries easily usable in a web environment. Hence the reason for the multitude of c or c-like functions. Eventually, the shift moved in a different direction.

I like to think that while PHP wasn't intelligently designed, it did evolve. And for my money, evolution beats out intelligent design.

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

#340

Post by jasonlotito »

kaens wrote: post #328
robomartin wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My general point is that evaluating languages based on personal or technical preferences might just be a flawed metric. Unless what you are doing is a hobby you have to deal with additional criteria. I pointed out just one such data points. I, for example, really love APL. I would also never think of using APL as the basis of a commercial project unless there was an overwhelming reason to do so. A friend of mine buil…

While you certainly make good points from a business perspective, it's becoming increasingly more likely that programmers you can hire that both: + know PHP + are experienced enough to deliver a working, maintainable application are also fluent in at least one of ruby or python, both of which are much nicer languages in general and have strong web-dev presences. The issue with hiring "people who know PHP" just becaus…

> issues with maintainability of whatever gets written tend to be much more of a pain than with similar projects in other high-level languages.

I'm not sure I follow this. If you take one of these good developers you are referring to, and write your codebase in PHP, what about PHP makes it difficult to maintain as compared to Python or Ruby?

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