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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?

#341

Post by zaphar »

luriel wrote: post #335
zaphar wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/*.

That's why I said tiny hole. :-)

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

#342

Post by akavlie »

Tichy wrote: post #98
xpapad wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate Python with a passion I cannot express or explain.

I don't hate it, but I hate it's growing popularity. It is the little things, for example functions like len() that should really not be standalone but belong to string or array or whatever (I am not that deep into python). Or the the crippled lambda. To me it is roughly equivalent to JavaScript - both have some syntactic sugar that the other doesn't have. But JavaScript has full power lambda and is overall much more…

I understand the frustration with the crippled lambda. But with regard to len() and other global functions that seemingly belong as methods on string/array/etc. -- it's worth reading Armin Ronacher's post on the rationale behind that:

http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2011/7/9/python-and-pola/

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

#344

Post by jorisw »

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…

Respectfully, I think two of your arguments stink.

2) The community. Surely there's a lot of garbage code floating around in the community, but are we going to judge a language by its community now? Perhaps the community is so big it produces a fair amount of garbage code appropriate to its size?

4) Ugly to look at. Perhaps, if you write ugly code. Again, this is about the programmer and not about the programming language. I think I write pretty code.

Disclaimer: I am a PHPer most of the time. But I realize that PHP is probably on its way out in the long run. And I agree with your two other points.

I chose ActionScript because it's a PITA to debug. Good programming languages make it easy to find your mistakes. PHP is good at that, as are a bunch of other languages.

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

#346

Post by mnoga »

I have only actually used about a dozen of these languages so out of those my least favorite would be a tie between Java and ColdFusion. I supposed it's only fitting that ColdFusion is actually Java underneath. Java is too verbose and overly complicated especially when you try to use it for web apps.

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

#347

Post by billybob »

ticks wrote: post #142
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 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 agree there is some language snobbery. However, I moved from PHP to Ruby and love it.

My two biggest gripes with PHP:

1) No standard package management system. I worked with some VERY smart developers at a PHP-only company, but nearly every part of their complex system was coded in-house, from the ORM up. Rubyists practically never code things that are available as well-tested gems, saving tons of effort, debugging, and training new people. That's a huge boost to Getting Things Done.

2) Little discoverability. If you can't remember the string method you want, you'll have to Google - and make sure you notice the order of the arguments. In Ruby, you can do `'foo'.methods.sort` and see all the methods available on strings. Since it's OO, you don't have to pass in the string itself, so there are fewer arguments to know in the first place.

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

#348

Post by batista »

nazar wrote: post #264
batista wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's Google's SPDY, but it doesn't fix all that we might like from HTTP, mostly performance stuff. I guess, it's the agreeing on something and then adopting it and then having it catch the market part that's making this difficult. On another field that I follow, we haven't had anything better replace MIDI for like 30 years...

Is MIDI bad? I mean, why do you think it should be replaced? I am not familiar with this area but I am honestly interested!

Well, the biggest limitation is that it has granularity of 0 to 256 for message data.

That means if you want an analog like continuous change from 0 to max for some audio property, you get stepping instead.

It's also not very fast for todays work with tons of channels.

I doesn't know about audio at all, etc.

OSC is a better replacement, but not widespread enough.

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

#349

Post by batista »

icebraining wrote: post #294
batista wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A redesigned transport model other than HTTP? Continuations? A saner front-end language that can also be used at the server side and it's not the Node.js failfest?

You can replace HTTP with anything you want using WebSockets, but I never got what's wrong with it.

Given that websockets don't even work reliably yet, and are not even implemented in all popular browsers of the day, that's hardly a proposition. Not to mention that everybody implementing his own HTTP replacement from scratch with websockets instead of a common standard is a highway to hell.

As for what's wrong with it:

- better support for non-blocking requests - better support for streaming media - better support for caching - better content negotiation (e.g for "retina" x2 assets) - better authentication mechanisms - better support for encryption

Also check: http://static.usenix.org/event/usenix99/invited_talks/mogul....

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

#350

Post by bunderbunder »

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?

All sorts of places.

I'd be willing to wager that there's hardly an OCaml programmer in this world who isn't also skilled in a few other languages.

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