Poll: What are your liked and disliked programming languages?

Right-o. The trick is to "read" it like pseudocode, or like English-ish.

    Log the inspected value.

    Save the model, then
      Update the UI with the attributes.

    Scale the rectangle by (the height times the factor).

The big syntactic difference still being the "model.save" vs "save the model" ordering of dot-notation. But them's the breaks.

And honestly, VB6 and VB.Net both get a bad rap. VB6 excelled at what it was designed to do, it was an easy-to-use language that was the fastest way to get a GUI up onto the screen and throw together a simple program. I learned on VB4 and it was great. It was the whole COM thing and the serious enterprise perversions of it that ruined the language.

VBA and VBScript, on the other hand, are abominations - the lack of an exception system is excruciating.

VB.Net is basically a few #Defines away from C# and has most of the nice functional features of C# they added in .NET 4.0. It's easy to read and powerful. Plus, the "Handles" keyword makes coding event-driven OOP objects quite pleasant.

My only problems with VB are the non-short-circuiting Boolean operators (so you have to write AndAlso and OrElse for short-circuit instead of And and Or), the bizarre +1 array sizing (but you should be using lists instead of arrays anyways so it doesn't matter) and the anachronistic Dim keyword. Even the option-strict thing makes sense because there are some cases where static typing is excruciating if you're just hacking something out - "oh crap, I have to use this terrible .net 1.1 library that predates generics, either I have to write a zillion typecasts or I can just go with dynamic typing".

"Assembly"? For what platform? I could care less about AT&T, I've learned to live with Intel, and I'm interested in ARM. It's rosy to think that I like 6502 but it's not the best. What does it even mean to, "like," one of these, "languages?"

I've only learned various assemblers by way of necessity writing compiler backends (usually in my spare time for fun... I don't even know these platforms well enough to write a serious production-grade backend with optimizations). Some I find easier to work with than others... but how can you, "like," one over another? I find assembly to be rather devoid of any characteristic that I find interesting or emotionally endearing.

It's easier to attach an emotional context to a programming language these days by proxy; I think most programmers simply associate with the culture that develops around a language. But there was an era when a programming language was just a manual and all you had was a compiler. There wasn't anything particularly interesting about using one over another beyond perhaps what they were capable of from a technical perspective.

So what does it mean to, "like," a language? Do you find it technically superior relative to all others? Is there some socially accepted criterion I am unaware of by which we measure how we feel about a language?

People are strange.

I like and dislike them all pretty equally. They all have their ups and downs, some more than others, but I've never completed liked one or not with no strings attached.

The problem is that sometimes what you write in CS results in surprising and/or incorrect JS.

This can be caused by an unnoticed block of whitespace, corner case of CS language itself, or me simply screwing something up.

About 5-10% of the time I hit a WTF in CS, which is, for now, an acceptable trade off vs. using pure boilerplate ridden JS.

If there was a concise TypeScript a la Scala for Java, I'd be all over it.