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What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

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Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#11

Post by throwaway2016a »

eximius wrote: post #6
Exuma wrote: post #2

Why is ruby so disliked D:

We're moving away from a Ruby codebase now. Everytime I have to grep the codebase to find where a method magically came from, I die a little on the inside. I won't say it is a bad language, but it allows and seems to encourage some bad habits.

> Everytime I have to grep the codebase to find where a method magically came from, I die a little on the inside.

Are you using Rails? My experience is a lot of the "magic" comes from the use of Rails not the language itself. Though since Rails inspired so many other Ruby frameworks and libraries, the magic has spread a little bit.

Overall I like Ruby for writing DSLs since it has tools in the language that make doing so really easy. But for a website I would... and this is going to be really unpopular... actually probably choose PHP over it. Easier to find coders, equally bad coding practices, but less magic.[1]

[1] IRL I tend to choose Node.js or Go but I have used PHP extensively in my career because it is everywhere. And Ruby because for the longest time Ruby was cool and PHP was frowned upon. Now they are both frowned on.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#14

Post by PaulHoule »

I remember writing a cross-platform library for web authentication that worked with signed cookies. You would log in through a PHP form and then I wrote modules to check the cookie and refresh it in just about every language used in web development in the early 2000s. That included PHP, Perl, Java, C#, Cold Fusion, and others.

Of all the authentication modules, the one in Perl was the shortest and sweetest.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#15

Post by jhbadger »

baldfat wrote: post #9

R is the most liked! I have to say that over the past 5 years the language has really just been getting better and better. I know a lot of people have a bad taste with R but I blame the bad non-programmers that used the language but Hadley Wickham and his tidyverse has turned this DSL into one of the best languages to use for its purpose.

I probably have written more lines of R than any other language, but I wouldn't say I like it. It is just so useful because of how much stuff is implemented in it already. From time to time I get fed up with it and try to use Python or Julia, but while I like both better as languages, there is always something I would have to spend a week implementing that there already exists an R package for, so I return.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#17

Post by bhauer »

var_explained wrote: post #7
bhauer wrote: post #5

The most fascinating section of this, in my opinion, is the "Rivalries" at the bottom that show the relationship between liking X and disliking Y. However, what isn't clear to me is whether this is one-directional or a blended bi-directional rivalry. For example, the third item from the bottom is iOS : Android. Is this the coefficient of liking iOS and disliking Android or is it a coefficient of liking either and dis…

OP author here: the rivalries there are directional, "if you liked X, you probably disliked Y", but not vice versa. (One thing I find interesting is that most rivalries really are directional: you see git users disliking svn, but not svn users disliking git). Perhaps there's a way I could make that clearer in the post!

> OP author here: the rivalries there are directional, "if you liked X, you probably disliked Y", but not vice versa. (One thing I find interesting is that most rivalries really are directional: you see git users disliking svn, but not svn users disliking git).

Awesome, thank you! I agree that the direction of the rivalry is an interesting part of it.

I just noticed that "backend : frontend" and "frontend : backend" both appear on the chart, which implicitly answered my question.

Perhaps another sentence or two that highlights this would help readers understand the directional nature of the chart. For example: These rivalries are directional, which demonstrates how rivalries are often asymmetrical. For example, as seen in the results chart, those who like backend have more distaste for frontend than vice-versa.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#18

Post by rhn_mk1 »

bhauer wrote: post #5

The most fascinating section of this, in my opinion, is the "Rivalries" at the bottom that show the relationship between liking X and disliking Y. However, what isn't clear to me is whether this is one-directional or a blended bi-directional rivalry. For example, the third item from the bottom is iOS : Android. Is this the coefficient of liking iOS and disliking Android or is it a coefficient of liking either and dis…

backend : frontend and the reverse are both present, that implies unidirectional relationship.

I like how illustrative it is in the general context of rivalries: I observed that people are most negative towards their neighbors, as opposed to those who are very different.

Perhaps it's because similar agents need to compete for similar resources?

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#19

Post by throwaway2016a »

Earlier in my career we moved to Ruby over PHP because Ruby was "cool" and PHP was not. Now it is interesting to see them lumped in the same group. Incidentally, PHP has improved greatly because of the rivalry with Ruby because the competition inspired PHP and PHP Frameworks to step up their game in the early 2000s / 2010s.

Python's continued popularity surprises me. While I like Python and it is good for data science I don't understand why people use it for websites. The PHP and Ruby ecosystems are far more mature if you consider ease of use and if you are going for performance, Go and Java based frameworks are better. Even in the data world, I kind of like R over Python.

I'm also glad to see Javascript highly ranked. I was under the impression that Node.js in particular was going the way of PHP and Ruby. But personally I like working with Node.

Edit: I wonder how much of this is due to popularity too. PHP is insanely widely used. Which attracts more entry level coders than a language that is broadly used for specialty / high performance / niche languages.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#20

Post by ashark »

eximius wrote: post #6
Exuma wrote: post #2

Why is ruby so disliked D:

We're moving away from a Ruby codebase now. Everytime I have to grep the codebase to find where a method magically came from, I die a little on the inside. I won't say it is a bad language, but it allows and seems to encourage some bad habits.

Rails in particular is the worst about that. Bonus points if you're working on an older codebase that's been upgraded through a couple versions, but is still fairly out of date. I hate having to keep so much fiddly crap in my head when, with a better language and/or framework, my tools could tell me what I need to know when I need to know it. Ugh, dynamically-named automagical variables and methods the definitions of which are ungoogleable and ungreppable. Gross. "Magic" is almost never worth the cost.

A Sinatra project written with some discipline and taste isn't too bad, though, and Ruby's still my preferred language for throw-away one-off tiny scripts, mostly because it's very concise, has lots of available libraries, and isn't Javascript.

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