Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Programming Languages - Hammer Principle

hammerprinciple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 56 posts

Re: Programming Languages - Hammer Principle

#21

Post by Symmetry »

polyfractal wrote: post #18

Wow, this is like a case study on how not to present data. I'm sure this is an interesting dataset...but it's so confusing.

Yes! I was very confused when I saw that Python was ranked high for being "good for beginners" but ranked low for being "usually bad for beginners". Then I realized it was actually actually intended to be ranked low in terms of being "bad for beginners". Which makes sense, if barely.

If you're going to have "ranked high" and "ranked low", make all the attributes positive.

Re: Programming Languages - Hammer Principle

#22

Post by jakub_g »

Symmetry wrote: post #21
polyfractal wrote: post #18

Wow, this is like a case study on how not to present data. I'm sure this is an interesting dataset...but it's so confusing.

Yes! I was very confused when I saw that Python was ranked high for being "good for beginners" but ranked low for being "usually bad for beginners". Then I realized it was actually actually intended to be ranked low in terms of being "bad for beginners". Which makes sense, if barely. If you're going to have "ranked high" and "ranked low", make all the attributes positive.

Yeah, Python is good case study for confusion as it has a lot of negative sentences in "ranked low".

I see in this thread that many people complain about it, so I've emailed author with the link to this thread and to Python's page and suggested renaming "Ranked high/low" to "Most people agree/disagree that..." or sth like this.

Otherwise, very nice idea.

Re: Programming Languages - Hammer Principle

#23

Post by the_cat_kittles »

You need to resolve this ambiguity:

When something is ranked low for a bad thing, is that good (and I think it is) or is that bad? For instance, python is ranked low for "There is a lot of accidental complexity when writing code in this language", which I think means that there is NOT a lot of accidental complexity when writing this code, but it might confuse people because it looks like you are presenting two lists, a list of top pros and a list of top cons.

Re: Programming Languages - Hammer Principle

#24

Post by FuzzyDunlop »

tinco wrote: post #14

The ranking process requires answering 110 questions.. I can not imagine you would actually need that many questions. Perhaps the author can use the already submitted questionnaires to see which questions correlate heavily, so they might be merged. The only language I know from this list that I wouldn't recommend wholeheartedly to someone else is Java, and that's just because I know C#. A bunch of languages I know ve…

Some of the questions are duplicate, in terms of both addressing the same characteristic, but leading it in either a positive or negative way.

Presumably this is to fit in the format of just clicking 'rank' or 'skip', for each question (which I think is also ambiguous).

Surely it would have worked better as 'statement -> yes/no[/skip]', cutting down the number of questions by about half (I'd guess) at the same time?

Re: Programming Languages - Hammer Principle

#27

Post by lucb1e »

http://hammerprinciple.com/therighttool/items/php

Jesus christ guys. It were probably others than visitors from HN (most here are a little more thoughtful and less trolling), but if there is nothing but negativism on the PHP page (I can't find a single positive point) then why in the world are we all using it? Why does almost everyone know the language? Why is it one of the biggest languages on the planet?

I don't trust this site anymore just because of the first item I happen to look at. PHP may or may not be a horrible language, but certainly it has some good uses and advantages to other languages, or it would never have become popular at all. Perhaps it's just because PHP is so easy and that's the only reason. I'm not saying it is, but it might be. But then at least that should have been written on the page.

Re: Programming Languages - Hammer Principle

#29

Post by skylan_q »

lucb1e wrote: post #27

http://hammerprinciple.com/therighttool/items/php Jesus christ guys. It were probably others than visitors from HN (most here are a little more thoughtful and less trolling), but if there is nothing but negativism on the PHP page (I can't find a single positive point) then why in the world are we all using it? Why does almost everyone know the language? Why is it one of the biggest languages on the planet? I don't tr…

I use plenty of javscript and PHP at work. They are poorly designed languages, IMO. (I am not an expert, but I'm familiar with many languages and I always read up on such topics)

>Jesus christ guys.

Despite the poor design considerations and wanting to kill off some of these languages, (or-rehaul them and not being able to) many of us still have to use them day-to-day. This is one of those things that convinces me that there is a God, and he's got a twisted sense of humor. I can't really explain it otherwise. :p

Re: Programming Languages - Hammer Principle

#30

Post by wging »

RyanZAG wrote: post #7
mctx wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoyed Visual Basic's top few: * I am sometimes embarrassed to admit to my peers that I know this language * I am reluctant to admit to knowing this language * The thought that I may still be using this language in twenty years time fills me with dread * This language is frequently used for applications it isn't suitable for * Code written in this language tends to be verbose * This language is likely to be a pass…

Still used heavily - but not in industry exactly. It is used mainly for creating little button macros in Excel documents to do some calculations in the document. It is generally not used directly - Excel lets you record a macro, where it will transform the user's clicks and actions into VB script directly. Users can then add this script to a button, and can repeat their actions by clicking on the button. So not a pro…

There are companies that still sell desktop software written in VB 6.
Post reply on HN