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

351–360 of 479 posts

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

#351

Post by XorNot »

Pxtl wrote: post #164
adolfojp wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

VBA in MS Access has On Error Goto.

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

#352

Post by solarexplorer »

thomseddon wrote: post #297

I've written a simple ranker for the above scores: http://ancient-garden-9751.herokuapp.com/ Python and C most liked, PHP and Java most disliked (currently) (Source here for if/when it goes down: https://github.com/thomseddon/lang-rank )

Nice. It would be cool to add a third column ordered by the ratio of likes/dislikes.

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

#353

Post by prehkugler »

asgard1024 wrote: post #140
nicholassmith wrote: post #112

I like C++. I dislike C++. No seriously. For everything good about a language there's usually something that's not so good and is completely frustrating. That's why there's so many programming languages, they're all awful and excellent at the same time, asking a favourite is like saying 'do you prefer being hugged whilst on fire, or being hugged by someone on fire'.

Sounds like a Stockholm syndrome. :-) No worries, I have that with Haskell.

Just yesterday, my colleagues were describing having Stockholm syndrome with Java. Went something like: "It's really easy to make fun of, but the more you use it, the more you start to feel bad for it."

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

#354

Post by skizm »

base698 wrote: post #340
skizm wrote: post #247

Damn Java has a 1:2 like to dislike ratio. Why do people hate on Java? I'm totally biased because it is the first language I learned and I use it daily but seriously, why the dislike? It is powerful, portable, stable, hard to shoot yourself in the foot with, and tons of standard libraries. Also the libraries (standard or 3rd party) rarely violate the rule of least surprise. I can nearly always guess the right way to…

For me it's this: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom... My first real job was programming Java and I have a bit of nostalgia for it, but having to do anonymous inner classes for a simple callback is kind of annoying.

Callbacks would be sweet, but for someone who never really used them till I got heavy into javascript I don't really ever think to use them right away. Also callbacks are mostly for asynchronous stuff which you can get away without using in java a lot of the time (I think, that's really the only time I use them at least).

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

#356

Post by XorNot »

seanalltogether wrote: post #310
smrtinsert wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I'm ready to start filtering anyone that prefers JS over CoffeeScript. Its just about superior in every way. Maintainability goes up as the lines of code drop precipitously and significant whitespace, come on guys. I use bracey languages all the time, and moving to one that doesn't isn't that big a deal. The real problem is there are a lot of "developers" that came up just doing simple Javascript functions…

"If adding a build step is an extra hassle, this might be the wrong profession." That's a very railsy answer. The strength of the web is that you don't need to run a build at all. I think that's the fundamental dislike of Coffeescript. I've worked on so many html frontends where a build process wasn't necessary to accomplish our job, and if someone tried to introduce one for the sake of coffescript it would simply be…

It's also that you lose any ability to step-debug at the moment. You still need to know Javascript to debug Coffeescript by and large.

That mental context-switch overhead is the whole driving philosophy behind NodeJS in the first place - don't switch languages so often. CS/JS is enough of a change that the overhead is not insignificant.

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

#357

Post by 51Cards »

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 a CF developer (among many other languages) for bordering 15 years now I have come to accept the blanket rejection of the platform. I had to smile at the stats above because I have to wonder if the number of people who have marked "dislike" have even used it (or at least any time recently)

As I write this there are about 2200 votes apiece for both PHP and Python, two languages most people will have an opinion on, so lets make an assumption that's somewhat representative of the voters to date. Also at the moment there are 500-ish down votes for Coldfusion. From my experience it seems suspect that 1 in 5 developers, or even 1 in 6, has worked with Coldfusion enough to have an opinion on it outside of external influence. This type of trend probably also applies to other languages, in both directions.

That said, on Coldfusion, it's far from perfect but it also gets a pretty unfair judging in my personal opinion. Just my 2c.

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

#359

Post by XorNot »

captainmuon wrote: post #119
barking wrote: post #71

Visual basic, no love in 15 years and still kicking C#'s ass on the desktop

Despite its flaws and the scores of bad software written in it, old-school VB was awesome! It was incredibly easy to click together a UI, and fill in the business logic. You had basically no boilerplate or glue code. And there was a huge market for components - report generators, glossy buttons, fancy list views, plotting controls, you name it. I believe the ease of use of VB and the availability of all those COM/Act…

I would go so far as to argue that we've never succeeded in composing anything better for the task either (since VB6 is hanging around).

The Linux desktop desperately needs something that easy to use, but which works with SCC and gently encourages some structure. Glade with a built-in Python IDE which hides the boilerplate could probably do it (along with a bit more clarity to how you build up an interface in Glade).

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

#360

Post by Shivetya »

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…

oh I would just be as happy to label anything case sensitive as something I don't like. Easy as that.
Post reply on HN