Poll: What are your liked and disliked programming languages? • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by mratzloff » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 4:22 PM UTC

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…

My first job included a significant amount of ColdFusion and CFScript. Having worked professionally in probably 10 languages since then, and speaking from personal experience, I feel comfortable in saying that ColdFusion is a terrible platform and deserves all scorn that can be heaped upon it.

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

#302

Post by regularfry » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 4:25 PM UTC

eonil wrote: post #275

I have to admit I have strong preference to available editor/IDE or REPL rather than language itself. I can adapt on any language if the language has enough feature set, but lack of fine toolset support is unacceptable. For instance, these features are highly expected 1. Syntax and scope based accurate auto-completion. 2. REPL debugger with accurate break-point and stepping. These features are optional but make it aw…

Are there any languages which fit all these criteria? I'm guessing commercial CL implementations might, but I've not tried them.

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

#303

Post by optymizer » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 4:25 PM UTC

Since these are all preferences, let's discuss those in the context of Actionscript.

Why the hate for Actionscript? I get that the AS VM is crap by JVM standards, but, having coded several large projects in actionscript, I think the _language_ is actually nice, when compared to its ECMAScript cousin, Javascript.

AS has classes, inheritance, getters, setters. It's event-driven, with sockets. You can access XML as el.child1.@property. Working with the Flash stage is easy: addChild(), removeChild(). You can embed resources and movies in SWF files. You can load shared libraries.

What am I missing? Is it just about the AS VM? Is it the hatred for Flash?

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

#304

Post by Kurtz79 » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 4:27 PM UTC

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…

For me it's a perfect answer to the question "Why there are so many programming languages ? ".

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

#305

Post by hadem » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 4:27 PM UTC

jrgnsd wrote: post #137

behrendtio wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in my experience though. The people who do like PHP are the ones who started with it and didn't use it too much yet. In my exp. a lot of ruby/python/node.js devs are former PHP developers who built several websites using PHP and switched because they got pissed about PHP (or stuff that is related to PHP). More interestingly imho is the percentage of people who hate PHP but still use it most of their time, since t…

I like PHP. I've coded in it (and other languages) for more than 10 years. I love the ease of use and the flexibility it offers. I must however add that, like a sibling comment, I think modern frameworks like Symfony 2 is the way forward for the language in a modern web stack.

I agree with you. Working with Symfony2 has dramatically changed how I work with PHP for the better. I know one of the major complaints people have with PHP is that developers often write poor code but it really doesn't have to be that way.

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

#306

Post by krapp » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 4:28 PM UTC

aaronem wrote: post #22

tmikaeld wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really get why people hate it so much, sure it has it's flaws, but it also has it's strengths.

Its strengths are few and equivocal; its flaws are unspeakable and legion.

Its flaws clearly aren't unspeakable because if they were so many people wouldn't keep droning on about them.

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

#307

Post by wglb » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 4:28 PM UTC

GnarfGnarf wrote: post #215

You're missing the most dreadful language in existence: Report Program Generator (RPG).

I second that. It did the unthinkable to me--it made me happy to program in COBOL.

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

#308

Post by meepmorp » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 4:31 PM UTC

jordigh wrote: post #276

meepmorp wrote: post #208

What? No matlab/octave?

Those are two separate languages, you know. :-) Some of the biggest annoyances about the Matlab language are not duplicated in Octave: http://wiki.octave.org/FAQ#What_features_are_unique_to_Octav...

I'd say they're two dialects of a single language, or (in natural language terms) separate languages with a high degree of mutual intelligibility. They share syntax, a lot of vocabulary, and have similar idioms.

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

#309

Post by regularfry » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 4:33 PM UTC

lowboy wrote: post #287

leokun wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>It also bugs the fuck out of me that CoffeeScript projects frequently end up being given a *.js extension If a project compiles down to Javascript and is intended to be used as such, a .js name suits it regardless of the source language.

For the project, possibly. Not for an individual source file. That's bananas.

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

#310

Post by seanalltogether » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 4:33 PM UTC

smrtinsert wrote: post #292

joeblau wrote: post #5

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

Personally I'm ready to start filtering anyone that prefers JS over CoffeeScript. Its just about superior in every way. Maintainability goes up as the lines of code drop precipitously and significant whitespace, come on guys. I use bracey languages all the time, and moving to one that doesn't isn't that big a deal. The real problem is there are a lot of "developers" that came up just doing simple Javascript functions…

"If adding a build step is an extra hassle, this might be the wrong profession."

That's a very railsy answer. The strength of the web is that you don't need to run a build at all. I think that's the fundamental dislike of Coffeescript. I've worked on so many html frontends where a build process wasn't necessary to accomplish our job, and if someone tried to introduce one for the sake of coffescript it would simply be an annoyance.