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What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

stackoverflow.blog

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Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#21

Post by eropple »

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.

I pretty strongly disagree with the idea that Ruby encourages those bad habits. But Rails? Specifically, ActiveSupport? Yeah, totally. But, effectively, Rails is building a context-specific DSL for web apps that happens to be leaking methods into your code. This is much, much more a Rails problem than it is a Ruby one.

My standard web stack is grape, grape-swagger, grape-entity, and Sequel (with some handy libraries like Ougai kicking around) and I don't run into any problems like that.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#23

Post by FollowSteph3 »

Exuma wrote: post #2

Why is ruby so disliked D:

I think it’s because it’s getting into the next stage. When it first came out almost all projects using it were new. Now it’s getting to the stage where new people are coming in to maintain existing RoR code bases, and that’s very different. RoR is great for quick development but it can be much more challenging to jump into an existing code base that’s been running for a while and has had a few different developers go through it ;)

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#24

Post by throwaway2016a »

ww520 wrote: post #22
Exuma wrote: post #2

Why is ruby so disliked D:

I would guess it's the same as Perl, too much magic.

I don't think that is why with Perl. Granted it's been over a decade so opinion might have changed but when I was in college Perl had a reputation as being a "write only" language. Where unless you had comments / documentation to explain it to you, if you encounter code you didn't write (or you wrote 6 months ago) good luck figuring out what it does.

All languages are like that to a certain extent but Perl more than others.

Edit: fixed "read only" to "write only"

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#26

Post by BlackjackCF »

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.

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 came from.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#27

Post by dozzie »

chrisaycock wrote: post #3

The article defines "like" vs "dislike" in terms of what developers list as preferences on their jobs profile. For example, Perl is the most "disliked" language; what that really means is that developers have actively listed it as a job opportunity they don't want. The analysis shows that there is a correlation between a language's "liked-ness" and its growth as a tag on Stack Overflow. Correlation-is-not-causation a…

> For example, Perl is the most "disliked" language; what that really means is that developers have actively listed it as a job opportunity they don't want.

In the specific case of Perl, this makes the analysis highly skewed. I liked using Perl (I no longer write in it because my current team already knew Python well and not even a bit of Perl), but almost all the job ads around me that mention Perl come from big, old corporations. I wouldn't want to maintain a corporate internal tool written in Perl, because Perl in such an environment means a very old and overgrown script (virtually all newer are written in Python) in a complex and complicated system that cannot be updated to modern architectural standards, and Perl from '90s and early '00s has a history of being used mainly by dilettantes who couldn't tell global and local variables apart.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#28

Post by dx034 »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #19

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 scienc…

> 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.

Python is very easy to use and often targeted towards non-programmers. You'll find a lot of tutorials online that don't require any previous knowledge of programming, different to other languages. At the same time, Python is popular with many full-time programmers which gives you the feeling that you learn a professional language very easily.

I personally think it's nice for scripts that only run once or need to be adapted continuously, which is often the case in data analysis. I switched from R to Python, I found function naming in R so confusing that I constantly had to Google basics even after years of using it.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#29

Post by baldfat »

jhbadger wrote: post #15
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.

I have talked with several people who were in your steps and then I mentioned that "hidden" inside of R is a scheme influenced part of the language. I ended up learning Racket, a fork from Scheme, and I have to say my enjoyment of R has grown, especially using it within the tidyverse family.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#30

Post by sidlls »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #19

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 scienc…

Django is at least as mature as any Ruby web framework and more performant besides.
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