What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages? • Hacker News Board

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#101

Post by vintagedave » Wed, Nov 01, 2017, 3:31 PM UTC

meredydd wrote: post #53

Gargoyle wrote: post #36

Delphi is the one the surprised me most. Primarily because I can't remember the last time I even encountered it.

I'm going to guess that's because using Delphi today means "legacy Win32 project I deeply resent maintaining". The general principle of a programmable RAD with a nice IDE and a visual designer is still very popular. I'd wager Delphi would also appear on a list of "most-missed" languages, because using Delphi back then meant a pretty nice developer experience.

Nowadays it can be used for cross-platform dev too: iOS, Linux, Android, macOS.

Still a pleasant language to use, IMO :)

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#102

Post by jmnicolas » Wed, Nov 01, 2017, 3:38 PM UTC

rmorgan wrote: post #48

jmnicolas wrote: post #13

I could see myself using VBA more if the "IDE" was not a 20yo piece of crap that pops a MessageBox every time you have an error (I seem to always forget to add the "then" when writing an "if"). Just underline the error but let me continue to code dammit.

Not to defend VBA or its IDE, but you can turn that off. https://stackoverflow.com/a/11561968/2258

You just changed my life !

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#103

Post by Exuma » Wed, Nov 01, 2017, 8:12 PM UTC

BlackjackCF wrote: post #26

eximius wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think Ruby's a bad language, but unless you've built some very good programming habits, it's really easy to get "too clever" with Ruby metaprogramming and do something that's conceptually neat, but makes everyone else who works with you want to strangle you. I left Ruby behind last year to program Go full time. It's much easier for me to not have to do the mental gymnastics of figuring out where a Ruby method…

How hard do you think a Go app would be for a medium-large sized web app? I wanted to write a payment processing website in Go, but I'm hesitant to start using that language.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#104

Post by BlackjackCF » Wed, Nov 01, 2017, 8:41 PM UTC

Exuma wrote: post #103

BlackjackCF wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Ruby's a bad language, but unless you've built some very good programming habits, it's really easy to get "too clever" with Ruby metaprogramming and do something that's conceptually neat, but makes everyone else who works with you want to strangle you. I left Ruby behind last year to program Go full time. It's much easier for me to not have to do the mental gymnastics of figuring out where a Ruby method…

How hard do you think a Go app would be for a medium-large sized web app? I wanted to write a payment processing website in Go, but I'm hesitant to start using that language.

Are you used to working in Rails?

If so, it's going to take a little bit of ramping up, but I was productive in writing a web app in Go within two weeks.

Keep in mind that the community eschews frameworks, but honestly... do what works for you.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#105

Post by ReversedYodel » Thu, Nov 02, 2017, 12:11 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #14

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.

I think of it a bit like some huge regexs, you only arrive at the final point by building up to it in small (succinct) steps, and if you need to revisit it later, the old grey decompiler has to work harder.

Perl coders I knew prided themselves on illegible but powerful one liners in a smug/elitist way ("Ha! You can't read that?? That'd be three lines in C. Ha idiot."). I prefer readable code.