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Poll: What are your liked and disliked programming languages?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: What are your liked and disliked programming languages?

#121

Post by jashkenas »

joeblau wrote: post #5

What is it about CoffeeScript that people don't like?

Most of the time, it's easy to ignore programming languages that you aren't familiar with. In day to day programming life, you're not going to be running into many examples of Eiffel, or Dylan, or D or E, in the wild. So you're not going to feel very strongly about them, either pro or con.

For better or for worse (I think for the better), CoffeeScript is fully interoperable with JavaScript. The runtime characteristics and the lowest-common-denominator ES3 support are such that you can use it just about anywhere you might want to use JS. That, and a modicum of success, means that JS programmers sometimes stumble across it in unexpected places, only after popping the hood. e.g. "I thought I was just using a simple library -- Eauggh! What is that stuff down there!" This makes it very hard to ignore...

As a JavaScript programmer, you're forced to ask yourself the question, "Why haven't I given CoffeeScript a real try yet?" Not all, but a large part of the dislike comes from folks rationalizing their response to that question to themselves.

tl;dr, CoffeeScript is almost perfectly situated to inspire fear and loathing in JavaScript programmers with closed minds.

Re: Poll: What are your liked and disliked programming languages?

#122

Post by michaelt »

rjbwork wrote: post #87
skriticos2 wrote: post #70

What I like: Python (3), C, C++, Shell. What I dislike: Java, C#, PHP, Objective-C. Python (3): it just has ridiculously powerful data structures and sensible error messages C: it's simple(ish), fast and keeps yuppies away C++: has great libraries and frameworks like Qt, is fast Shell: quick and simple for small tasks Java: mainstream and boring, people expect me to use it and work with horribly broken code created b…

>C#: Microsoft Mono, XSP, Xamarin, etc. make your argument pretty much moot if you set up properly. C# is an ECMA standard, most of the C# source code is open source or is being open sourced, and there is a large and active open source C# community. This may have been true 5-10 years ago, but if you're really super anti-MS, you can still use C# today. It's a fantastic language with fantastic libraries. Disclaimer: I'…

Some colleagues of mine work on a C# windows app - I thought I couldn't help them out, as I use Linux. Maybe I can though, based on what you're saying.

Can I take a C# project targeting Windows, develop compile and developer-test on Linux, then second test and deploy to Windows?

Re: Poll: What are your liked and disliked programming languages?

#123

Post by nikoftime »

joeblau wrote: post #5

What is it about CoffeeScript that people don't like?

Very interesting that people are saying things like "significant whitespace" and "too similar to python" - I personally love Python and I like that coffeescript bears some resemblance to it. I voted "Coffeescript - Like" because it removes many of the mundane aspects of JS programming.

Definitely doesn't solve many of JS's problems, but it certainly makes things easier when writing client side apps. We use it a lot for Backbone development.

Re: Poll: What are your liked and disliked programming languages?

#124

Post by TillE »

colkassad wrote: post #61

Regarding the language itself, what's there to dislike about C#?

It lacks some of the syntactic niceties and metaprogramming you get with languages like Python.

Otherwise it's quite good for what it is, and my frustration with C# is entirely down to the ongoing failure of Unity Technologies to upgrade the version of Mono included with their game engine. It means I'm stuck with an old version of C# (notably without the dynamic type), watching as quite a few third-party libraries drop support for it.

Re: Poll: What are your liked and disliked programming languages?

#126

Post by ceronman »

wting wrote: post #59
simias wrote: post #6

And the award of least significant poll of the week goes to... Seriously, you won't get anything meaningful out of this, people will vote for the language they like and then bash the usual suspects (PHP, actionscript, C++,...). Also they will browse the first 20 entries or so and then get bored and skip to the end. I'm sure the people who "dislike cobol" (7 people at the moment) have intimate knowledge of the languag…

There will be obvious winners and losers, but I'm interested in the long tail results. The poll quantifies a community's thoughts as only the vocal minority comment while the majority lurks. It provides a snapshot for comparison with other communities or even to Hacker News 18 months ago. Language threads will provide more insightful commentary, but a general poll is useful for macro trend discussion.

I think it's very interesting to see some changes in the Hacker News community. For example, CoffeeScript's like/dislike ratio seems to be much lower now that 18 months ago. I bet some articles had an important impact in its popularity. Same would happen with MongoDB for example. It'd be nice to run this kind of poll every month, and try to correlate with specific articles that changed the mindset of the community.

Re: Poll: What are your liked and disliked programming languages?

#128

Post by jrgnsd »

mercurial wrote: post #96
sequoia wrote: post #52

"Raise your hand if you hate PHP" many hands go up "Keep your hand up if you've actually built a project using PHP" most hands go down But my coool poooints!! I need to show the guys I hate PHP so they won't think I'm a newb!!

Oh, I'm doing worse. I'm actually maintaining a project using 1999-era PHP .

My deapest, deapest sympathies. Up until a few years back I was doing the same. It was the most unproductive years of my life.

Re: Poll: What are your liked and disliked programming languages?

#129

Post by jashkenas »

leokun wrote: post #34
joeblau wrote: post #5

What is it about CoffeeScript that people don't like?

It's near unreadable. It's optimizing the wrong things, prettiness (I don't think it's very pretty at all) and keystroke counts, vs readability, fewer errors and maintainability. It also bugs the fuck out of me that CoffeeScript projects frequently end up being given a *.js extension in the name and how often people who want nothing in the world to do with CoffeeScript, people like me, end up having to deal with it f…

    > [...] how often people who want nothing in the world to do with CoffeeScript, 
    > people like me, end up having to deal with it for some reason. Like I 
    > don't like ada, and I never have to look at it. ada never ends up in 
    > my editor or on a github page I'm looking at, but frequently someone 
    > puts CoffeeScript somewhere where someone was expecting JavaScript, 
    > like a StackOverflow answer, or a package for Meteor, or something. 
    > If CoffeeScript stayed out of my life, and I out of it, I would probably 
    > hate it a lot less.
As the creator of CoffeeScript — I think your answer here is right on the money. It's a pretty perfect answer to joeblau's question.

Re: Poll: What are your liked and disliked programming languages?

#130

Post by throwaway_yy2Di »

jashkenas wrote: post #92
throwaway_yy2Di wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The syntax is broken. Things like operator precedence and associativity are the exact opposite of math conventions: f x + f y // is f(x + f(y)) f g x // is f(g(x))

Not quite -- the rule is pretty simple: Implicit function calls associate to the right, to the end of the line (or the end of the trailing block). This allows you to write code like this: console.log inspect value model.save(attrs).then -> ui.update attrs rect.scale height * factor ... and have all of the results come out correctly, while leaving the code readable. If the rules were "more math-like" as you say, then…

My brain isn't plastic enough to make this switch. :( For me, those code examples are uncomfortable to look at. backwards read to trying like It's
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