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What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

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Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#51

Post by jriririd2883 »

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…

And?

I don’t really see the article selling anything else

Why do we need to quibble about every blog post as if some horrible “mistake” made within, in this case lack of rigor in a pointless topic, will doom us all.

Defend the honor of these languages I guess. Though it seems no one cares

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#53

Post by meredydd »

Gargoyle wrote: post #36

Delphi is the one the surprised me most. Primarily because I can't remember the last time I even encountered it.

I'm going to guess that's because using Delphi today means "legacy Win32 project I deeply resent maintaining".

The general principle of a programmable RAD with a nice IDE and a visual designer is still very popular. I'd wager Delphi would also appear on a list of "most-missed" languages, because using Delphi back then meant a pretty nice developer experience.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#54

Post by alephnil »

myth_drannon wrote: post #16

So a decline in language is causing people to avoid/dislike it or a dislike of a language is causing the decline in popularity ?

If someone to dislike a programming language, they have usually been exposed to a codebase written it. Very few dislike something they have never encountered. That means that the language must have been popular at least at some point if a large number of people dislike it. That may either be because it is no longer considered modern (e.g. Fortran, Cobol) or different communities are split in their view for some reason (PHP, Visual basic).

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#55

Post by christophilus »

> One tag that stands out is the functional language Clojure; almost nobody expresses dislike for it, but it’s still among the most rapidly shrinking (based on question visits, it only started shrinking in the last year or so)

That's an interesting observation. Having learned Clojure this year without asking a single StackOverflow question, I don't think this means Clojure is shrinking. I suspect that Clojure's crazy good stability means no new questions are really required for core things.

Also, Clojure tends to not be anyone's first language, if Clojure Conj is any indication. Most Clojure developers I've ever met have been programming for > 10 years. Experienced programmers don't tend to ask as many "how do I do this in language X" questions.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#56

Post by throwaway2016a »

laylomo2 wrote: post #38
throwaway2016a wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wouldn't that make perl a "write-only" language?

Yes. Thank you. I didn't proof read my post and made a mistake. I meant to say "write only"... the original has been edited. Thanks again!

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#57

Post by dkarl »

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.

Least disliked — big difference. What I see in the graph is that the dislike measured here seems to be a combination of two factors:

  1.  The badness of the language is palpable and well-understood.
  2.  It is easy to imagine that a different language could have been chosen for the task at hand.
For instance, Groovy and Go are about equally disliked. I'm not a huge Go fan, but I would expect it to be preferred as a language over Groovy. However, since it's a new language being used mostly for new systems, it's a language of choice rather than necessity. A programmer working around an annoying wart of Go can find himself thinking that his life would have been easier if only someone had been smart enough to choose language X instead. People using Groovy are working on legacy systems involving Grails, where the language choice was in the far past and may have been a good one at the time, or Gradle, where people may feel that at least Groovy is better than XML.

The same reasoning explains why Bash and Perl are on opposite extreme ends of the chart. Bash is unavoidable; Perl is as avoidable as cargo pants.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#58

Post by singularity2001 »

jpfed wrote: post #39

The next step is obviously to take the most-disliked technologies and combine them into something so bad it's good, like "the most unwanted music" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPuH1yeZ08 ).

hilarious and almost not off topic. this ladies rap horse thing though ...

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#59

Post by petre »

dozzie wrote: post #27
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, ol…

We have rewritten a web app that used CGI.pm and ported it to Mojolicious. It also uses JavaScript on the front end. I'll choose Perl any day over JavaScript/ES/Node.js. There is still innovation going on in the Perl5 community, like Mojolicious, Promises, Moo, MOP, Moxie etc. Most tooling is sane and you don't end up with competing package managers, a plethora of build tools, transpilers, frameworks and an endless chain of dependencies.
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