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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?

#421

Post by orclev »

wtetzner wrote: post #400
cmelbye wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain this a bit more in depth if you have a chance? This is extremely interesting, but I'm not familiar with terminology associated with strongly typed languages. What do you mean by using records instead of maps?

You can think of a record like a C struct. It's key value pairs, but the keys and their types are chosen at compile time. There are no methods or anything on them, they are just data. An example from OCaml: type person = { first_name: string; last_name: string; age: int } In a language that has some form of anonymous records (like C#'s anonymous object) and structural typing, this would let you work with relations in…

You still need some kind of mapper though to go from the SQL results to your record type, even if it's using convention such as the records fields are named the same as the table columns you're pulling from. I'm not arguing that for instance Hibernate is awesome, just that you need something to fill that gap, and you can do a lot worse than Hibernate, particularly within the limitation imposed by Java. Personally I prefer something like this ( http://hackage.haskell.org/package/esqueleto-1.3.4.2/docs/Da... ), but will usually settle for Hibernate or similar in less powerful languages like Java.

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

#422

Post by adamonduty »

wtetzner wrote: post #312
orclev wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

First, you can have strongly typed languages that aren't object oriented. Instead of using maps/dics, you could use records. The thing I don't like about ORMs as they are typically handled is that you map objects to tables up front, and those are the things you can query for. Using something like Linq, you can more easily treat your database as relational, and still return strongly typed objects. These objects can be…

> you can get the data in the shape you want, not in the shape it's stored.

If you build a database view, you can often trick an ORM into thinking its a table.

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

#423

Post by TillE »

Miyamoto wrote: post #311

You can tell this is a bullshit poll by how many people like C. Don't get me wrong, it's a great language, but there's no way there are that many people programming in C. It has as many likes as JavaScript. Rather, people just voted C because it's a favorite language and it usually has positive press around Hacker News. So people vote what's popular and hip, despite probably having never stepped out of their web deve…

Yeah, I find the popularity of C on nerd forums in the past few years completely baffling. Writing all your data structures from scratch is a nice educational exercise and all, but it's incredibly tedious when you're doing actual work.

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

#424

Post by vorg »

mindcrime wrote: post #210

I'm surprised at the lack of love for Groovy. Groovy rocks... I made the decision to switch all of our development to Groovy (and Grails) a couple of years ago, and I haven't regretted the move at all... it's gone astonishingly well. Much faster development than in raw Java, but without a huge learning curve, and yet still with seamless integration with existing Java libraries, plus more than a few very cool native G…

> I made the decision to switch all of our development to Groovy (and Grails) a couple of years ago

Look at Groovy's history before 2 yrs ago and you'll see what's not to like. Groovy recently (29 Aug) turned 10 yrs old but no one was celebrating.

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

#425

Post by gravedave »

Some of my thoughts: I'm surprised by the dislike of Actionscript (guess it's memories of AS2 mostly). AS3 is quite nice in my opinion, and the display list is a charm to work with, while FlashDevelop is one of the nicer IDEs that I've had experience with. Sure, it runs on Flash and the timeline concept is weird when not making animations, but that should have no bearing on the language itself (and it seems there are efforts towards alternative runtimes anyway, who knows where this may go in the future). I'm surprised by how many people like Go, because, while nice, seems not very relevant and a bit directionless imo. Also surprised by the overwhelming popularity of Python compared to Ruby, which I think is better than Python in every way (except performance, but both are the wrong tool for such a job in my opinion). I don't see why there is a "Lisp" here, as it seems to have both Scheme and Clojure, but (weirdly) not Common Lisp. Rust shouldn't be here either, as it's a WIP. Judging a language that's still in alpha seems... wrong.

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

#426

Post by bshanks »

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 )

Added:

  like+dislike
  like/dislike
  (like/dislike)*log(like)
  (like/(like+dislike))*log(like)
  (likeDirichlet/(likeDirichlet+dislikeDirichlet))
  (likeDirichlet/(likeDirichlet+dislikeDirichlet))*log(likeDirichlet)
  lower bound of confidence interval at 95% level
http://arcane-waters-4617.herokuapp.com/

source: https://github.com/bshanks/lang-rank

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

#428

Post by Abscissa »

bolder88 wrote: post #139
atwebb wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's going to be the common blabber and hating on the usual suspects but polls like this tend to be good ways to bring up a general topic and let everyone discuss. Maybe it would've been better in a AskHN but at least here we get a list to reference (and for people to get angry at what's missing, people love getting angry). Also, it gives a view of what this specific community in this specific thread feels and add…

Polls like this are the equivalent of asking a builder if he likes wood, metal, concrete, plywood, slate, etc. Or if he likes a saw more than a hammer. Which only a complete moron would do.

That's only a valid comparison if you're really big into polyglot programming AND believe that all languages are great in their own special way.

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

#429

Post by Abscissa »

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.

Actionscript has basically no error checking. It'll check for syntax errors and that about it - every other error manifests as a strange bug or "why the F* is nothing happening!?!" Then you spend an hour tracking it down and discover the cause was some trivial thing that any normal language would have simply raised a compiler error for in the first place.

And on top of that, its libs are very callback-heavy even in places where a synchronous option should have been available, so even very basic sequential code sometimes gets turned into a messy chain of callbacks.

That's why I made a beeline for the "ActionScript - Dislike" button.

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

#430

Post by vezzy-fnord »

babuskov wrote: post #98

What's Shell? If you mean Unix/Linux shells, you should have picked a couple, or just used Bash, because many people would upvote one shell and downvote another. Csh, Bash, Zsh are completely different when it comes down to what you like or dislike.

Seconded.

Shells like rc have much more different syntax (and are arguably cleaner) than common ones like Bash.

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