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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?

#351

Post by robsteranium »

asjo wrote: post #255
attractivechaos wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like it. It is possible to show the other poll (on favorite languages) along side? Thank you!

Yes, here is a scatter plot: · http://koldfront.dk/misc/hn/pl/data.png I would like to make a bar chart with favorite votes pointing up from the x-axis and dislike votes pointing down, but my rudimentary R skills doesn't stretch that far yet. Here is the scatter plot on with log scales: · http://koldfront.dk/misc/hn/pl/log.png

Haha! Great minds think alike. I just went through a very similar sketching sequence and reached basically the same conclusion!

I've plotted the positions using proportion of max votes (as a proxy for response rate) to account for the different number of voters responding to each poll (with actually counts added). And my axes are reversed!

The bipolar bar chart you're aiming at should be pretty easy to achieve if you first make the dislike values negative. I'm happy to write some code to demonstrate if you'd like.

edit: link - https://gist.github.com/2206278

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

#352

Post by zaphar »

jorisw wrote: post #344
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 lan…

Respectfully they are subjective so I expect people to disagree. However:

The community is a huge part of judging a language. You'll note that I specifically said this appears to flow from the core developers out. A sentiment many in this thread appear to have shared. That to me is a danger sign. The community often is a signal regarding how the core devs of the language approach things.

As for beauty it's completely and purely subjective so what looks beautiful to one person can look ugly to another.

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

#353

Post by kaens »

jasonlotito wrote: post #340
kaens wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you take one of these good developers, nothing much, other than that they might need to write some things that they wouldn't have to think about in other languages.

If you take a developer who isn't as good, or isn't as experienced, and they create a ball of mud, it's easier to get it to a maintainable point by a good dev if it's written in a language other than PHP.

Some things about PHP that make it difficult to maintain over time are things like lack of consistency in abstraction, lack of first-class objects, extreme behavioral dependency on php.ini, incomplete reflection capabilities, and so on. These types of things are much bigger of a deal when trying to refactor a messy codebase as opposed to developing on a pretty clean one. They're getting better as time goes on, but the other popular web-dev languages are miles ahead, and it's extremely likely that a good dev capable of writing PHP code is familiar with one of them.

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

#354

Post by [deleted] »

irahul wrote: post #174
pgroves wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal of Java was always to be able to "write large programs quickly." In some ways that sounds terrible by itself, but I think it turns out to be legitimate. I've been on python projects that need to grow but struggle b/c all the things that make it easy to get a lot done the first few weeks become liabilities very soon. Adding developers to a project that doesn't declare types and encourages just passing around…

> The goal of Java was always to be able to "write large programs quickly." That wasn't the goal of Java, not by a mile. The goal of Java was to build a language that runs everywhere, and to facilitate Sun's "everything(your watch, toaster, pc) is networked" ambition. All the things that people flout about Java saying that how it helps them manage large projects(completion, re-factoring, ide integrated debuggers, goo…

[deleted]

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

#356

Post by jamesgeck0 »

billybob wrote: post #347
ticks wrote: 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 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…

I thought PEAR was PHP's standard package manager?

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

#357

Post by jasonlotito »

whateverer wrote: post #333
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…

> 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.

> fearing very much the Broken Window effect from all the glass scattered in the ground around PHP all the time.

You can't program if you use a broken window as a measure of whether you use the language or not. I do not know of a language without issues, ugliness, or mistakes.

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

#359

Post by kamaal »

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…

So in short according to you the language is useless if doesn't have type safety?

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

#360

Post by kamaal »

bunderbunder wrote: post #350
gnosis wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That still doesn't make a case to learn OCaml.

What it means is, People who learn OCaml generally have to learn something else too. Because the jobs just aren't there. Which in case the person is better off learning that something else properly.

And that is a very big problem.

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