Perl is the most hated programming language

boing
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I think this is basically the list of languages people have to use for one reason or another, i.e. languages that have been used for a long time and have legacy software written in it.

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Came here for this, was not disappointed.

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Interesting breakdown, but the least disliked language is R?

R is a shockingly dreadful language for an exceptionally useful data analysis environment. The more you learn about the R language, the worse it will feel. The development environment suffers from literally decades of accretion of stupid hacks from a community containing, to a first-order approximation, zero software engineers.1 R makes me want to kick things almost every time I use it.

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Obviously none of them have tried AWK. Pearl was created to make things easier.

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I recently received a headhunter call looking for COBOL experience

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Certainly in the case of Delphi, which is a lovely language and environment (and now has a open source version in Lazarus). I doubt people are really hating Delphi as such but the fact that most Delphi applications at this point are projects started in the mid 1990s and probably been maintained in inconsistent fashion by half a dozen programers since the original version.

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i’m really curious whether the same results would apply if stack overflow incorporated country of programmer origin.

when i was abroad i noticed that people outside of the united states had a slightly different gestalt of the tools they liked.

ruby, for instance, had more traction in japan – partially because it was invented there, and partially because its libraries are less ansi-focused. it seemed to have a huge online community, and lots of support for people learning its ins and out. but, all in written japanese.

it might be part of why english has grown to such dominance around the world. because so much of the software documentation and community is english-based and software dominates.

every programmer of (almost) any programming language has to wade through english documentation and grasp english keywords – but, it doesn’t mean that everyone is happy about that.

perhaps every spoken language winds up with their own collective documentation that’s slightly walled off from everybody else’s.

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I think it’s all due to the begin … end rather than curly brackets.

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Ugh, the mention of VB6 triggers an anger response with me. I’ve used it, built stuff with it, and didn’t hate it (I just like C# a ton more).

Definitely has its use, but my gripes come with meeting a lot of senior-level VB6 developers, who threw their weight around like rockstar programmers, while somehow not really understanding how software works. o_0

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We joke at our company- Hang around, read their obits, ‘plenty’ seems getting smaller every day.

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SQL is fine. MDX, on the other hand, is evil.

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Kind of snobby and exclusionary. Learn the hard way or don’t learn is a shit pedagogy. Stack Overflow provides a valuable resource for people learning. It was also co-founded by our very own @codinghorror. I’ve sent several people newly learning to code there.

ETA: Just to be clear, I’m not trying to return your snark, just letting you know it comes across as a little snide.

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…but presumably they’re not going to Stack Overflow for help with (for example) Lisp, Rexx, or Pascal (Turbo and/or non-Turbo).

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Met an old guy making an absolute killing programming COBOL. I suppose anyone could learn it, but seemed like you had to grow up in it to be able to decode the old stuff.

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“Don’t believe the hype is SQL…”

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I’ve never used COBOL, but a lot of the mystery with legacy code is a lack of consistent documentation.

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Yup. An uncle of mine is currently doing exactly this. I don’t think he’s making a killing, per se, but the pay is decent, and plenty of work to tide him over. Works with a lot of young guys working in modern languages building connectors to old mainframes.

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I’m surprised Haskell isn’t hated more than most languages but then again not many people use it beyond financial institutions or universities.

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Sorry for being snide. I was speaking from personal experience. It has become a joke at $work to recommend that solutions be directly copied from SO after a code audit revealed several instances Javsacript functions taken from popular answers.

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I think because it’s a query language and not a programming language it didn’t make the list. Then again BASH made the list and it’s at best a command language so what the heck, throw SQL in there too.

Met one of those too. He programmed microcode for DEC VAX and Data General AViiON systems. He saved an ancient mini computer with 25 minutes of work and we happily paid him $2K for it.

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