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What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

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Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#41

Post by jmnicolas »

Gargoyle wrote: post #33
jmnicolas wrote: post #13

I could see myself using VBA more if the "IDE" was not a 20yo piece of crap that pops a MessageBox every time you have an error (I seem to always forget to add the "then" when writing an "if"). Just underline the error but let me continue to code dammit.

I don't mind VBA in its native habitat, I just usually don't like its native habitat. There are several languages on this list like that. I wonder if C# for example has that as a factor.

I'm a C# dev since 2009, so I probably can't answer you objectively ;-)

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#43

Post by drblast »

Gargoyle wrote: post #33
jmnicolas wrote: post #13

I could see myself using VBA more if the "IDE" was not a 20yo piece of crap that pops a MessageBox every time you have an error (I seem to always forget to add the "then" when writing an "if"). Just underline the error but let me continue to code dammit.

I don't mind VBA in its native habitat, I just usually don't like its native habitat. There are several languages on this list like that. I wonder if C# for example has that as a factor.

That has to be why C# is ranked below Java. I don't understand a world in which people would prefer Java, the language, over C#, the language, all else being equal.

Working with C# likely means working in an MS-centric environment which is probably what this is measuring more.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#44

Post by throwaway2016a »

sidlls wrote: post #30
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.

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

I've only worked on one Django project and I inherited it from another team so it could be because the coders on it originally were no good but my experience with Django was the opposite. You're milage may vary, maybe I'll give it another shot someday.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#45

Post by erikpukinskis »

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

My guess is a big part of it is Python’s “one right, preferably obvious way to do it” principle.

Rails does this “convention over configuration” thing which really means “anything could come from anywhere”. View not rendering? Literally anything could be going wrong anywhere in your stack. Some convention somewhere is tripping you up.

The “one right way” principle in Python mitigates this chaos. You can at least reason about what’s “pythony” when you’re thinking about it. It helps that the ecosystem is smaller too.

The Ruby community, and JavaScript to an even greater degree, are more focused on individual preferences, which vary greatly. So you have to wonder... is this a “modern”, transpiling, framework-thinking JavaScript developer, or a functional, small is beautiful, package-oriented one? Or something else entirely?

Python wins because they value consistency over the bleeding edge of architecture innovation. This is consequently also why they lose.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#46

Post by throwaway2016a »

dx034 wrote: post #28
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-prog…

> Python is very easy to use and often targeted towards non-programmers.

Maybe that is my problem is I am coming at it as someone who knew 10 programming languages before even looking at Python. But my wife is trying to learn Python right now and she's not a code (she's an biomedical engineer) and I can't say her experience learning it has gone any smoother than it would have with some of the other languages.

> I switched from R to Python

R suffers from the same problem as PHP. The standard library is too large, does too much, and grew organically. So you have things like inconsistant naming. I do agree that is horribly frustrating about R.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#47

Post by throwaway2016a »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #45
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 My guess is a big part of it is Python’s “one right, preferably obvious way to do it” principle. Rails does this “convention over configuration” thing which really means “anything could come from anywhere”. View not renderi…

> Python wins because they value consistency over the bleeding edge of architecture innovation. This is consequently also why they lose.

That is an awesome quote about Python. I might borrow it. Thank you for that.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#48

Post by rmorgan »

jmnicolas wrote: post #13

I could see myself using VBA more if the "IDE" was not a 20yo piece of crap that pops a MessageBox every time you have an error (I seem to always forget to add the "then" when writing an "if"). Just underline the error but let me continue to code dammit.

Not to defend VBA or its IDE, but you can turn that off. https://stackoverflow.com/a/11561968/2258

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#50

Post by ballenf »

> Git might be a source of frustration to many developers (it certainly is for me!), but it’s rare that people admit it on their resume ...

That statement doesn't make a lot of sense. The "dislike" tag is understood to be the list of things you don't want to work with (as in, "don't contact me about jobs if the job involves using xxxx tool/tech/language"). Resumes don't generally have a section for "sometimes frustrating/tricky stuff that I don't even question that I'll be using."

You just can't ignore the alternatives (or lack thereof) to any of the "disliked" stuff in the article.

The running theme in the strong dislikes are languages and tech that were once popular but have been surpassed by newer, easier to use or work with alternatives. That may happen one day to git, but it would seem a long way off.

There's also a running theme of the dislikes often representing working with older legacy code. So the listed languages might just be the devs' proxy for disliking working with legacy projects (vba strikes me as an example of this, since it was hugely popular but no one is really using it in anything new).

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