Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Poll: What are your liked and disliked programming languages?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 479 posts

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

#231

Post by edtechdev »

netcraft wrote: post #58

im curious what people dislike about groovy. I haven't tried it much but it seemed like a decent language and good alternative to java. I wasn't thrilled with the availability of frameworks for it, but that was about the only complaint I really had.

I don't dislike groovy - I remember studying the compiler 8 years ago (I was helping work on the boo compiler at the time).

But every programming language I've ever seen has flaws - that are both objective and subjective. If I were a Ruby developer wanting to create something on the JVM, I might think that groovy is inferior to JRuby, for example. If I were a straight up Java developer, I might think that groovy is slow or inconsistent or too unsafe (how some people perceive ruby's monkey patching). I'm not saying any of those perceptions are correct, but it is very easy to imagine all kinds of reasons and perspectives for disliking every single language up there. Heck, for about a third of them, it's harder for me to imagine reasons that people DO like them. But I know that's just my opinion, man, and who I am to stop people from using drugs, jumping off cliffs, or using Perl.

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

#232

Post by fdr_cs »

wting wrote: post #38
adolfojp wrote: post #25

This poll should be more specific with Visual Basic. There are a few different languages that share the name VB. VBA VB.NET VB6 VBScript

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.

There is a Scheme option for Racket/Chicken

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

#233

Post by byroot »

michaelt wrote: post #122
rjbwork wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>C#: Microsoft Mono, XSP, Xamarin, etc. make your argument pretty much moot if you set up properly. C# is an ECMA standard, most of the C# source code is open source or is being open sourced, and there is a large and active open source C# community. This may have been true 5-10 years ago, but if you're really super anti-MS, you can still use C# today. It's a fantastic language with fantastic libraries. Disclaimer: I'…

Some colleagues of mine work on a C# windows app - I thought I couldn't help them out, as I use Linux. Maybe I can though, based on what you're saying. Can I take a C# project targeting Windows, develop compile and developer-test on Linux, then second test and deploy to Windows?

Probably not, the language and most core libraries are supported by Mono, but things like WPF etc, are windows only.

So unless your Windows app is in GTK#, you won't be able to help them.

Saying that C# is multiplatform is like saying that Objective-C is, it's true technically, but having an app that run on both platform is a PITA because most libraries are not cross platform.

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

#234

Post by edtechdev »

anuragramdasan wrote: post #223
edtechdev wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't down vote those or other languages I haven't really used. But you honestly can't think of any feature of those languages that might turn people off? ((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((? any)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

To be really honest, a Lisp programmer doesn't really see that many parens in his code. And clojure doesn't even have those many parens. Maybe its just me, but I have only seen those who haven't used Lisp complain about too many parenthesis.

As I mentioned, but you still downvoted me, I didn't downvote lisp. I have used lisp - required to use it in a course. And I do recall seeing that many parentheses in lisp programs. I recall seeing that many parentheses (and curly braces) in C, C#, Java, Javascript, Perl, Scala, groovy, PHP, and other programs, too. Let's not pretend they don't exist though.

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

#235

Post by sjwright »

mindcrime wrote: post #207
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…

realise that ORMs are inherently stupid. That's quite the claim... Care to expand on why you think ORMs are "inherently stupid"?

Because you can't cleanly map objects to sets nor sets to objects. Sure, if you want to pretend an RDBMS is an object store you certainly can, but you'll be forced to have an incredibly stupid schema, and will miss out on much of the benefits of a good RDBMS.

Turning a powerful SQL database engine into an object storage emulator is just sad.

If your underlying data suits objects better than sets, consider using something that's designed for the job, like one of the many non-SQL database systems.

  Although it may seem trite to say it, Object/Relational Mapping
  is the Vietnam of Computer Science. It represents a quagmire which
  starts well, gets more complicated as time passes, and before long
  entraps its users in a commitment that has no clear demarcation
  point, no clear win conditions, and no clear exit strategy.
http://blogs.tedneward.com/2006/06/26/The+Vietnam+Of+Compute...

Well worth reading.

Also:

http://database-programmer.blogspot.com.au/2010/12/historica...

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/06/object-relational-m...

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

#238

Post by orclev »

mindcrime wrote: post #207
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…

realise that ORMs are inherently stupid. That's quite the claim... Care to expand on why you think ORMs are "inherently stupid"?

also without an ORM do you just hand roll all your object graphs? I'm picturing a sea of builders and factories which amount to a hand rolled ORM anyway. Or are you practicing stringly typed programming? Ultimately in any strongly typed language you're either going to make/use some kind of mapper or else abandon typing and use maps/dicts which raises the question of why you're using a strongly typed language in the first place.

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

#239

Post by tel »

captainmuon wrote: post #162

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, b…

I've heard a few interesting arguments (mostly by Gilad Bracha) against type-dependent semantics, though I don't think these arguments usually apply in this situation where you're just talking about polymorphism in (+). The argument is that if your language doesn't have type-dependent semantics then you can plug and play type systems as completely independent static analysis tools.

I don't know that I buy that those tradeoffs are best, but there is something really interesting there.

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

#240

Post by sejje »

mercurial wrote: post #96
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!!

Oh, I'm doing worse. I'm actually maintaining a project using 1999-era PHP .

I'm also in this boat.

Luckily it's just a small backend part of an application that got brought along. That said, I've spent an inordinate amount of time with it given its size.

Post reply on HN