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Poll: What are your liked and disliked programming languages?

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

#221

Post by tel »

efa wrote: post #186
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…

My thought exactly. Actually I was think - "geez, these people are such hipsters". Everyone loves the "cool" languages - Scala, Haskell, etc. But of course the lame languages suck (Java). Though I was pleasantly surprised to see the love for C#. It's a very nice language and you'd think being from MS it wouldn't be "cool".

What's the concern? Is there any reason why disliking a language for reasons of fashion is bad?

I personally think that I'd maybe prefer not to work with someone who likes (and argues) for languages due to fashion... but I'm also a by-day-and-night Haskell developer, so I imagine that invalidates my opinion in some ways.

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

#222

Post by 83457 »

sjwright wrote: post #141

Saddened to see a high number of ColdFusion dislike votes. As a CFML developer who routinely bears the brunt of gleeful derision, allow me to point out what you're missing out on. Yes, ColdFusion was a bit awful in its early days, but to be fair, it was pretty much the first of its breed, predating PHP, JSP, and ASP. Modern CFML is a JVM-native language and framework that runs in a Java servlet engine. There are thre…

No mention of CFScript

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

#223

Post by anuragramdasan »

edtechdev wrote: post #214
anuragramdasan wrote: post #182

While I find this poll rather insignificant and pointless, I can't help being amused by the amount of downvotes Common Lisp and Clojure have received. Can someone(probably someone who downvoted) please explain me what is wrong with those languages? Not being a snark, just curious.

I didn't down vote those or other languages I haven't really used. But you honestly can't think of any feature of those languages that might turn people off? ((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((? any)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

To be really honest, a Lisp programmer doesn't really see that many parens in his code. And clojure doesn't even have those many parens. Maybe its just me, but I have only seen those who haven't used Lisp complain about too many parenthesis.

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

#224

Post by LeafStorm »

bane wrote: post #160

Curious about all the Go dislikes. From the kind of things that get posted here I'd have assumed it to be almost universally liked. Anybody can provide reasons?

For me, it just feels like instead of taking efforts to carefully design the language, they just picked the first thing that worked and froze it. And while I really like some features of the type system (such as interfaces, lambda/function types, multiple return values, and the "type switch"), the lack of overloading and generics does have some pretty serious effects on readability (especially when you have compiler-supported functions that do overloading and generics, but don't allow it in userland).

It also seems like the way they resolved a lot of issues in the surrounding tooling was to not decide. For example: how many spaces should we use? Screw it, we'll use hard tabs! How should we handle dependency loading and package management? Screw it, we'll hard-code the URL to our dependencies in the source code! How to handle dependency versions? Screw it, we won't!

It's not a horrible language (like shellscript), but I think they wasted a lot of opportunity to make something better.

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

#225

Post by fdr_cs »

nicholassmith wrote: post #112

I like C++. I dislike C++. No seriously. For everything good about a language there's usually something that's not so good and is completely frustrating. That's why there's so many programming languages, they're all awful and excellent at the same time, asking a favourite is like saying 'do you prefer being hugged whilst on fire, or being hugged by someone on fire'.

I guess that liking or not, depends on how much you like the features, to forget/forgive/disregard it's drawbacks. For example, Python has drawbacks ... but, I do LOVE the language, is just such I joy to code in Python, that I just dont care that much about its problems. For me, is the same for C and Lua But, for C++, is the oposite. I do like some of its features, but, overall, I really hate the language. Too much headaches and pitfalls. And it's the same for javascript. But, hey, it's a personal opinion. I do really respect brendan eich as a developer, even lot liking javascript.

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

#226

Post by tel »

mindcrime wrote: post #207
sjwright wrote: post #141

Saddened to see a high number of ColdFusion dislike votes. As a CFML developer who routinely bears the brunt of gleeful derision, allow me to point out what you're missing out on. Yes, ColdFusion was a bit awful in its early days, but to be fair, it was pretty much the first of its breed, predating PHP, JSP, and ASP. Modern CFML is a JVM-native language and framework that runs in a Java servlet engine. There are thre…

realise that ORMs are inherently stupid. That's quite the claim... Care to expand on why you think ORMs are "inherently stupid"?

I think ORMs are "inherently stupid" (or: "quite likely to be leaky as abstractions") because they don't necessarily share a theory with the underlying databases ("something like but not exactly relational algebra") and I don't think many people spend time proving that the OO-like theories can be properly embedded into something-like-relational-algebra.

Not saying you can't get work done with them, but it does mean that they're likely to leak.

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

#227

Post by Pxtl »

midnitewarrior wrote: post #218
Pxtl wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Yes, there are some backwards compatibility artifacts in the language. I like how verbose it is, little room for ambiguity when sharing code with lesser-experienced programmers. C# is efficient, but a bit cryptic for people not well-versed on c-style languages. Also, curly braces.

I think curly braces are perfectly clear, to me the big problem with C-derived languages is the use of cryptic Boolean operators. The SQL-style "And", "Or" and "Not" Boolean operators are far more legible than "||", "&&" and the easy-to-miss "!".

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

#228

Post by orclev »

ceronman wrote: post #126
wting wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For me at least I liked the concept of CoffeeScript, but had a couple issues with the implementation. I was originally very interested in it, but after experimenting with it for a little while decided not to use it as I felt it didn't really gain anything over using a particular style/subset of javascript itself.

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

#229

Post by Kesty »

hugofirth wrote: post #154
asdasf wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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++,...) Why do you insist that is not meaningful? Of course they will vote for the language they like, that is the purpose of the poll. Obviously people can vote from ignorance, but that goes both ways. Just as some people "dislike" cobol despite a lack of experi…

The point is that the opinion of someone who has used a language and platform is of inherently more value when judging said platform than the opinion of someone who is coming from a position of total ignorance. In this sense your statement is a logical fallacy.

Actually not in a case like this.

This is not a pool for finding what is the "Best Language" (best language for what ?), but a pool to find what languages programmers like or dislike.

That is a matter of personal taste and opinion and there is not a wrong or a right answer.

Obviously if you have never seen or used or looked at the language you shouldn't vote on what other people say, but you don't really need to know the ins and out to make a personal decision.

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

#230

Post by pertinhower »

Polls like these are amusing but they're not particularly helpful. They broadcast subjective feelings about the "coolness" of languages at the expense of objective evaluation of languages.

How many of you upvoted "Go" even though you've never really tried Go, just because you feel like it has got zeitgeist and pizzazz and you're attracted to trying Go? Did you downvote Visual Basic? Have you ever used it? If not, you probably downvoted it because hating Visual Basic is a mark of an Enlightened Programmer; wearing a Visual Basic t-shirt to work would either be a joke or a mark of death. But these are social, subjective, impressionistic evaluations we're talking about. Do the languages actually deserve these judgments?

So, if the goal is to propagate and entrench the existing impressions that people tend to muddle around with (because, after all, how many of us really have the chance to deeply learn---deeply enough to form a sound opinion---more than one or two new languages a year?), then mission accomplished. But if the goal is to shed light on the respective value of languages, darkness has fallen.

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