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Poll: What are your liked and disliked programming languages?

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

#161

Post by tylerlarson »

redman25 wrote: post #29
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…

Just curious, why are people bashing Actionscript? The language itself is based on Javascript and Javascript isn't getting so much hate. I know everyone hates Flash now... maybe I just still have a soft spot in my heart for programming Flash-based games back in the day.

Based on the numbers that I see, JavaScript is disliked more than ActionScript. When you take into account people's general dislike for anything flash related and how few people know anything about the language I think it did ok. What would be interesting would be to see a poll of the different versions of ECMAScript proposals and see what the public thinks of the real language differences between each. Classes are coming and structs are proposed and many of the things that ActionScript has had for a while are also leaking into JavaScript like rest arguments, and proxy objects. Overall I think ES6 is clearer and more flexible and I'm cool with omitting types unless you are doing things like types arrays and so on. ActionScript will go away over time and over time JavaScript environments will catch up even if they are still way behind in many respects today.

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

#162

Post by captainmuon »

Funny, I'd say I like functional programming... and yet I disliked all the functional and/or lisp-like languages that are the bees knees these days... Scala, Scheme, Clojure, Haskell, F#, ... All of them have neat sides, but I'm not really productive in any of them.

There are things like too-clever type systems that get into your way, instead of catching errors. Constness can be silly in C++ if you are not careful, but that's nothing against the situation in e.g. Haskell.

Then there is type inference, which really scares me. When I write (in pseudocode):

fun add(a, b) { return a + b; }

the meaning can change depending on how this is called at a different place in my code (e.g. with strings or ints as arguments). On the one hand, this confuses me - if there is a conflict, it can be incredibly hard to debug. On the other hand, the compiler can get confused. If I call add(get_number(x), get_number(y)), I know that a and b are going to be ints, but the compiler might be unable to infer this, depending on how complex get_number is. Type inference is magic, and IMHO often not worth the saved keystrokes. I'd rather have my language use a Variant type when no type is specified (and sure, when it can infer the type, use it as an optimization).

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

#163

Post by LanceH »

simias wrote: post #39
redman25 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, why are people bashing Actionscript? The language itself is based on Javascript and Javascript isn't getting so much hate. I know everyone hates Flash now... maybe I just still have a soft spot in my heart for programming Flash-based games back in the day.

1/ Because it's at the top of the list and people are more likely to cast a vote 2/ Because most people (myself included) don't know actionscript but think Actionscript == Flash and downvote based on that.

There needs to be some way to differentiate people that hate a language for some external reason (anti-MS, anti-Apple, anti-Flash) or those who hate it from having used it. I suspect Java has more dislikes from actual users, where Actionscript and Perl get their dislikes from people who have never gone full time in either language.

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

#164

Post by Pxtl »

adolfojp wrote: post #55
wting wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can also break out Lisp into Arc, SBCL, Emacs, Chicken, Racket but I have to draw the line somewhere. Also historically VBasic has not garnered many responses thus the catch all.

Some VB variants like VBA, VBScript, and VB6, are indeed similar enough to be grouped into a single item, I'll grant you that. VB.NET, however, is not. It's basically C# in VB's clothing. It kept the VB name and some of its syntax to bring VB6 developers into the world of .NET. So, IMHO, grouping VB.NET with VB6 would be like grouping C, C++, and C# together just because they have a C in their names.

VBA and VBScript (iirc) have only On Error Resume Next, while VB6 has On Error Goto. This is a tremendous difference in how you structure your program's error handling.

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

#165

Post by wslh »

mercurial wrote: post #145
wslh wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I was clear enough in my opinion. I don't think it's an issue related to the programming language but how the community works. As ern said there are people in the .NET following this approach with stuff like the entity framework.

For further information you can read: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PatternAbuse

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

#166

Post by DanielBMarkham »

nercury wrote: post #132
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #18

What? No love for F#? Why do folks always leave F# out of these things?

I liked F#. Even build a web request handler using it :) However I kind of don't trust Microsoft to keep supporting this side project... Remember FoxPro?

Right now one of my side projects involves F# on Mono.

I write in Visual Studio, which I own, I deploy to Mono, which is free, and I have access to all the MS libraries over in linux, which are also free.

What's there to support? Do I really need version 7.0 of F# with the neuro-cranial implants? Or do I need just to write solutions for people?

F# is a great transition language from OOP/Imperative-land. You can write code the old way, the new way, purely functional, or in a hybrid fashion. I don't think we require much MS support for it to continue to fulfill that role.

Now if you're deploying to windows, that could be another kettle of fish. But I don't do that anymore.

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

#167

Post by sjwright »

Grue3 wrote: post #95

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

> then I looked up examples on Wikipedia. Good God.

The examples on Wikipedia don't do it justice. Modern CFML is written largely in C-style script form, much like JavaScript in feel.

The examples you see on Wikipedia is programming within the old language form now (mostly) reserved for templating.

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

#168

Post by kvb »

nercury wrote: post #132
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #18

What? No love for F#? Why do folks always leave F# out of these things?

I liked F#. Even build a web request handler using it :) However I kind of don't trust Microsoft to keep supporting this side project... Remember FoxPro?

Thankfully the compiler is open source and there's a thriving community outside of Microsoft (see http://fsharp.org), so this shouldn't be a big worry. And Microsoft hasn't shown a lack of commitment thus far (in fact, with the Visual Studio 2013 release F# gets new features but C# doesn't, as I recall).

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

#169

Post by bfish510 »

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…

As someone who has only associated cold fusion with people laughing, thanks. I'll be sure to look into as an option before I start my next side project.
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