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

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

#141

Post by sjwright » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 2:12 PM UTC

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 three first-class from-scratch implementations, two of which are fully open source. To cut a long story short, the best one is called Railo, and yes, it's one of the open source ones.

Modern CFML running on Railo is an awesome environment to work in: PHP-like hackability, native JVM performance, first-class java library integration, all on a 100% pure open source software stack. Think of it as JSP for genuinely rapid development.

I swear if Railo wasn't associated with the stigma of ColdFusion, it would be up there in the pantheon of fashionable web languages. It's Groovy with batteries included. It's Ruby On Rails for people who wish their code ran faster and realise that ORMs are inherently stupid. (Or there's Hibernate integration for those who haven't realised this yet.)

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

#142

Post by Erwin » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 2:12 PM UTC

debacle wrote: post #37

simias wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it usually creates interesting discussion. Just a billion of comments with no replies along the line of "XXX is great!" "YYY sucks!". Everybody talks and nobody listens. It's just pointless popularity contest.

You have no idea what you're talking about. XXX is terrible. The new release of YYY has solved a lot of the problems that most people complain about.

None of the ideas in YYY are new. It's a mundane and vulgar rehash of things we already had in the ZZZ in 80s but done badly. OK, so the world's largest sites run YYY -- that's pure luck, not science. Or the fault corporate HR drones that don't know better asking for YYY skills. Or a massive conspiracy. Or maybe programmers just are dumber now than 10 years ago.

How can YYY even be taken seriously when not supporting homobubonic retroviral proto-smurfs? In fact, I've just written a nice tutorial on smurfs in ZZZ and how smurfs are just like smurfs -- once you are past that, writing a complex application like a "20 questions" game should not be a problem.

Don't get me started on dynamic versus static smurfing!

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

#143

Post by happimess » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 2:13 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #19

timdiggerm wrote: post #2

I hope it's okay to vote Like and Dislike for javascript

I would have done that for XSLT if it had been on the list.

Forgive my ignorance, but I inherited a wad of xslt fairly recently, and it seems frustrating and verbose to me.

What do you like about it? Can you point me to some examples of good code?

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

#144

Post by asdasf » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 2:13 PM UTC

camus wrote: post #65

rfnslyr wrote: post #7

I don't discriminate. All languages are equal in my eyes, each with their own quirks and adventures. Except PHP, PHP can fuck off.

Last week i had to create an Android App generator that takes a json manifest and generate Java Models,ContentProviders,activities,resources,unit tests for each Sqlite table in my app = 4/5 hours of work in PHP. days of work saved each time i need to bootstrap an app. This week I needed a command line script that optimizes image files for different form factors = 30 minutes of work in PHP I needed the first script to…

If that is your point, than you really failed to support it. Obviously you can do stuff in PHP. You could have done all that stuff in any scripting language. The closest thing to a benefit you listed was "we already had PHP installed on a server". If that is your best sales pitch, you should stop trying to sell it and let others take on that role.

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

#145

Post by mercurial » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 2:13 PM UTC

wslh wrote: post #100

mercurial wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a "pattern-oriented solution"? As opposed to what?

Many libs in Java require to think about patterns instead of giving you a straightforward way to accomplish your goals.

Do you have more concrete examples of "pattern oriented solutions" that exist in Java and not in C#? Are you trying to say that C# is so expressive that it doesn't need, for instance, factories?

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

#146

Post by sjwright » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 2:14 PM UTC

rip747 wrote: post #83

seeing how there was quite a bit of CFML bashing going on yesterday, i doesn't surprise me that ColdFusion has that many dislike votes. BTW, its CFML, NOT ColdFusion. ColdFusion is a product, CFML is the language. it would be the same as having JRuby on the list instead of Ruby. if you're going to have a poll on programming languages, then at least label said languages correctly.

> its CFML, NOT ColdFusion

And this isn't some academic or semantic point -- the best implementation of CFML isn't even ColdFusion.

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

#147

Post by astrobe_ » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 2:15 PM UTC

Pitarou wrote: post #125

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.

PHP's only real strength is it's ubiquity.

Like hmmm... Java and Javascript?

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

#148

Post by falcolas » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 2:15 PM UTC

homersapien wrote: post #116

sequoia wrote: post #52

"Raise your hand if you hate PHP" many hands go up "Keep your hand up if you've actually built a project using PHP" most hands go down But my coool poooints!! I need to show the guys I hate PHP so they won't think I'm a newb!!

PHP haters are hysterical, I mean that in the clinical sense. It is powerful, flexible, blazing fast (relative, I know), and arguably the easiest (or at least most accessible) language to learn. Its flexibility is what generates most of the hate. It gives you the freedom to create some really bad/stupid code, which noobs inevitably do. But hating it because it will let you hurt yourself is like hating a table saw bec…

A table saw doesn't try to disguise its blade as the stop button...

My favorite bug to date? Uninitialized variables being interpreted as strings. That's the one I get to debug for clients on a regular basis. "Why can't I make this DB connection?" "Because you forgot to initialize the variable containing the database name."

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

#149

Post by stinos » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 2:15 PM UTC

V-2 wrote: post #62

wslh wrote: post #57

I like C# more than Java because: - The .NET Framework is a straightforward way to solve a problem vs pattern oriented solutions. This is not about the programming language itself but how the people in that community think about a problem - C# evolved more than Java and it was more pragmatic. There are no operators in Java. - I really like the diversity and maturity of third party Java libs. That's why I use IKVM whe…

Collections in Java are awful. Guava helps a bit, but it's still poor man's substitute. No LINQ, no lambdas (and the upcoming Java streams API is ugly as well), no delegates, no events. Verbosity. C# is a very nice language, only WPF sucks big time.

Used WPF a couple of times, not that bad at all? What exactly do you think can be improved? Are there alternatives to it?

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

#150

Post by sjwright » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 2:15 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #111

Grue3 wrote: post #95

I was wondering why ColdFusion is doing so poorly, but then I looked up examples on Wikipedia. Good God.

When I used it, in 1998, it was so ridiculously unstable we had to write a service to restart it when connections started to pile up on IIS. Under heavy loads, the server had to restart every minute or so.

It wasn't great, but it's not like there were many good alternatives in 1998...