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Poll: What's Your Most Disliked Programming Language?

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Re: Poll: What's Your Most Disliked Programming Language?

#131

Post by locopati »

pgroves wrote: post #102
mtkd wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't ignore context. Fortran is a very strong language for a specific application - you can't compare it to Javascript. Delphi was a framework using Pascal. It was a revolution at the time - and you can see it's influence in many software tools available today. You could argue that the current SQL/Rails API/JSON/Backbone/JQuery/CoffeeScript/HTML/CSS abomination we've created could be improved or replaced with so…

I wish there was some way to vote for that abomination in the poll. Personally, writing Java/Html hybrid templates that are served as html documents and then further manipulated by dynamically altering the DOM in javascript on the client is the stupidest programming style I can imagine.

Out of curiosity, what is your favored alternative for web applications? Server-side rendering of complete pages? Client-side manipulation of pure HTML?

Re: Poll: What's Your Most Disliked Programming Language?

#132

Post by peterhi »

After several years of Java programming I am now in the position of being able to turn down offers of work. I consider having been a Java programmer akin to having appeared in a porn movie. I was young, naive and needed the money.

I am seriously considering excising Java from my cv and replacing it with something I would be more comfortable with - like Mumps :)

Re: Poll: What's Your Most Disliked Programming Language?

#133

Post by zaphar »

I chose PHP because it's gathers everything I hate about any language in one spot.

* It has everything including the kitchen sink but nothing in the decor matches. There is no unifying principle to help you grok the language

* The Community is all about quick hacky fixes to already broken code and this approach seems to flow from the core developers out.

* It's not type safe, not even at runtime. I don't know if I ever want to work in a language that doesn't have proper type safety as a guard rail. (Note I'm not talking about compile time vs runtime type safety I'm just talking about type safety period)

* The code is just plain ugly to look at and I used to be a pretty heavy perl coder so that's saying something.

I know some of these are pretty subjective but for me php just manages to hit every single one of my top programming language gripes.

If you want to know my favourite that's a much harder question to answer. Golang has been pleasing me lately although it's interfaces have a very tiny hole in the type safety.

ML and it's varying descendants have as close to my ideal type system as I've ever seen. But the chances I'll ever get to use it for a job are slim to none and it seems the community is a little too academic for my taste.

Lisp has the most awesome metaprogramming built in and I had a brief heady love affair with it until it's lack of good type safety brought me back to earth.

I suppose all this means I'm one day fated to write my own "ideal" programming language so it can be featured in a list like this :-)

Re: Poll: What's Your Most Disliked Programming Language?

#134

Post by ufo »

LeafStorm wrote: post #124

Shellscript - both sh and csh. It has horribly inconsistent syntax, a myriad of ridiculous quoting rules that always explode on you whenever something unexpected shows up as data, almost zero data structures, and you have to fork a process to do anything . If not for the fact that it comes standard on every UNIX system, everybody would be laughing at anyone who tried to write anything serious in it.

I learned to avoid bash really fast: the first script I wrote in it took more then half an hour to get right because I wasn't expecting it to treat 0 as true and 1 as false in the if statement.

Re: Poll: What's Your Most Disliked Programming Language?

#135

Post by kstenerud »

stuckk wrote: post #34
chrisacky wrote: post #28

Easily Visual Basic for me. My first exposure academically to a programming language was Visual Basic. This was what they "force-taught" at school. I already had experience with Java/PHP/C, and just wreethed inside with disgust at the rationale for learning Visual Basic. It was a horrible experience that was forced upon me by my school's teacher. (I was about 16-17 at the time I think). As a form of silent defiance,…

my first academically forced language was Java and now I hate java the most. I wonder if more people hate the first language they got taught.

My first language (after basic) was 68000 assembler (unless you count digital logic), followed by C and C++. When I went to college, they were imposing Object Pascal, which seemed a clunky and pointless language overall. It's possible that the language wasn't as bad as I made it out to be, but first impressions tend to be lasting impressions.

Re: Poll: What's Your Most Disliked Programming Language?

#136

Post by pepijndevos »

zaphar wrote: post #133

I chose PHP because it's gathers everything I hate about any language in one spot. * It has everything including the kitchen sink but nothing in the decor matches. There is no unifying principle to help you grok the language * The Community is all about quick hacky fixes to already broken code and this approach seems to flow from the core developers out. * It's not type safe, not even at runtime. I don't know if I ev…

I once found a login form where 1e3 was a correct password, when yours was 1000. I'm still not sure if it eval'd your password, but it was PHP for sure.

Re: Poll: What's Your Most Disliked Programming Language?

#137

Post by xyzzyz »

zaphar wrote: post #133

I chose PHP because it's gathers everything I hate about any language in one spot. * It has everything including the kitchen sink but nothing in the decor matches. There is no unifying principle to help you grok the language * The Community is all about quick hacky fixes to already broken code and this approach seems to flow from the core developers out. * It's not type safe, not even at runtime. I don't know if I ev…

What do you mean by type safety? Are all dynamically typed languages type unsafe by your definition?

Re: Poll: What's Your Most Disliked Programming Language?

#139

Post by guard-of-terra »

Some comments on popular choices: I chose C++ because it's a horrible language that holds a lot of industry hostage. You can't use anything else because of tooling and network effect, but writing C++ is painful and dangerous.

A few years ago I would use PHP because it's so horrible and it destroyed a lot of innocent souls who entered programming via it, forever damaging their understanding of consistency, abstraction and modularity. But these days PHP is a dying emperor and there's no much reason to care. Visual Basic is even more strange choice because the language is not as bad (primitive, but not very bad) and you can skip it.

People pick JavaScript because they don't like not having choice + having to adopt to quirks, but on other hand we could never get anything better. Imagine if browsers defaulted on some kind of BASIC (no OOP, confusing data types, obtuse data structures, no hash maps, huge confusing spec) and that's what we'd have to use? Brendan Eich is a genius, he created a language for twenty years in ten days.

Java: Those who actually write in it have reasons to hate it, those who don't just translate their groupthink, I believe.

Re: Poll: What's Your Most Disliked Programming Language?

#140

Post by attractivechaos »

crntaylor wrote: post #37

I don't expect that the responses to this will be enlightening. In fact, I can predict right now that the winner of this poll will be the most commonly-used language which isn't widely considered to be "nice". Depending on the precise demographics of this site, that's either going to be Java, C++ or Javascript, despite the fact that there are clearly worse languages out there (Fortran, COBOL, Brainfuck...) The reason…

I agree this poll by itself is a little misleading, but if we take this poll and the poll on the favorite languages, we will get a better picture of what people are thinking. Here are the numbers for a few popular ones, as of now: C:780,22; C++:424,213; C#:658,42; Haskell:431,14; Java:435,389; Javascript:1125,149; Python:2484,39; PHP:516,334; Ruby:1373,84; VB:34,249. There are still multiple ways to interpret the results, but I really think this poll is extremely enlightening combined with the other poll. I like them.
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