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

What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

stackoverflow.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 105 posts

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#81

Post by sumeno »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #24
ww520 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would guess it's the same as Perl, too much magic.

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…

Perl definitely can be "write only", but it doesn't have to be as long as you don't try to be too clever, but I could say the same about most languages. I wouldn't want to work on a stack that was centered around Perl, but it is fantastic for quick one off scripts or relatively simple file processing tasks

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#82

Post by oneweekwonder »

mamcx wrote: post #72
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…

> While I like Python and it is good for data science I don't understand why people use it for websites. This is the reason, actually. Python is NOT ONLY GOOD FOR WEBSITES. In fact, the only thing that have stopped python for total global domination is to be poor for mobile apps. Do not underestimate the power of make a "full stack development" with just one language.

> Do not underestimate the power of make a "full stack development" with just one language.

unfortunately we already have that language and to use it you need to transpile... It will always be Ryby/js, py/js, php/js until web assembly becomes a thing I guess.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#83

Post by gozur88 »

christophilus wrote: post #55

> 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…

>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.

That seems like wishful thinking. If new people are picking up the language there should be noob questions on StackOverflow no matter how stable the language is.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#84

Post by gozur88 »

lmm wrote: post #69
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 ).

So a Perl webapp for Internet Explorer (with a SOAP API, and some pages using Flash), hosted on IIS, developed with Subversion?

Heh. We had something really close to that until about a year ago. And yeah, nobody wanted to work on it.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#85

Post by christophilus »

threatofrain wrote: post #79
christophilus wrote: post #55

> 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…

It's also shrinking on Github participation, which I don't think is good. Are you saying that Clojure is growing, but it's growing with people who feel like giving back less? Meanwhile, Scala is skyrocketing. I would imagine that this is because Clojure somehow missed the big data race.

I'm not making a judgement call about whether Clojure is growing or shrinking. Just saying that StackOverflow isn't a good gauge for the reasons I listed.

Github is a better gauge. I wasn't aware that it was trending downward. My impression was more that it was slowly accreting instead of following a sharp curve, which is just fine by me.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#86

Post by sushid »

CaptSpify wrote: post #74
Yizahi wrote: post #49

I'm surprised by JavaScript results. I expected it to rival Perl for top place.

I really wonder how much this is tainted by being at SO? There's a huge JS audience there vs other sites, IME. Additionally, I'm kind of a JS hater, but I really only hate it because it is just too often mis-used, not because it is actually bad itself.

Misused? How so? Are you referring to those that give advice with "just import lodash and use ___" or "you can do this easily in jQuery like _____"?

I find that a lot of the JS answers are pretty good, and there are many 2-3+ year old answers that are edited with ES6 updates to the answer, which is pretty amazing/nice.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#87

Post by vorg »

dkarl wrote: post #57
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 langu…

People tagging Like or Dislike on their programming language are usually comparing it to another one. So programmers will "like" Apache Groovy compared to Java, "dislike" Perl compared to Bash, or "dislike" Go compared to C++.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#88

Post by nilved »

eropple wrote: post #80
nilved wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ActiveSupport does that because Ruby encourages it.

Ruby allows it. Ruby allows a lot of things. So does C++. So does JavaScript. So does Java . Deciding to do it is a question of taste.

I think it goes further than that unless you don't consider the documentation and standard library sufficiently encouraging.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#89

Post by CaptSpify »

sushid wrote: post #86
CaptSpify wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wonder how much this is tainted by being at SO? There's a huge JS audience there vs other sites, IME. Additionally, I'm kind of a JS hater, but I really only hate it because it is just too often mis-used, not because it is actually bad itself.

Misused? How so? Are you referring to those that give advice with "just import lodash and use ___" or "you can do this easily in jQuery like _____"? I find that a lot of the JS answers are pretty good, and there are many 2-3+ year old answers that are edited with ES6 updates to the answer, which is pretty amazing/nice.

I'm not saying that the advice is misused, but that JS itself is misused by most of the sites that implement it.

Re: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

#90

Post by luord »

I love javascript, it's basically the language I like working in the most after python, yet I expected it to be near the top of the disliked tags. Good, I guess, even if it does appear anyway.

Loving that postgresql, docker and python are so uniformly liked.

The backend/frontend rivalries I found hilarious for some reason.

Post reply on HN