I seem to remember a Larry Wall or somesuch person wrote an article about what type of music is each language what analogous to … such as C++ was Baroque, and Java was elevator music, et cetera.
Perl was cartoon music/Looney Tunes, iirc
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Yup. I’d add a lack of any consistency what so ever. Like decoding a medieval scroll. Time for me to dip my pen, open the big book, and
continue writing … retirement is just a few months away.
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If the signal-to-noise ratio on Stack Overflow wasn’t so crappy, I might agree with you. As it is, with its mountains of misinformation, poor solutions that are upvoted and favorited, and loads of info that is just plain wrong, Stack Overflow should be the last place that learning programmers should turn to as resource for information.
I lump Stack Overflow in with the myriad failures of crowd sourcing.
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to be fair, that article specifically talks about the fact that solutions on stack overflow become outdated, not that they are inherently wrong. their professional take was:
“We encourage all programmers looking to benefit from the guidance found on Stack Overflow to resist the urge to apply solutions to their work without first reading the full answer, other answers to the same question, and any warnings left as comments by previous readers.”
they do not say “don’t use stack overflow.” and they primarily castigate library designers who don’t properly deprecate insecure or otherwise outdated apis.
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Among other things, Perl is self-obfuscating. One of my developer friends calls it a write-only language.
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I wouldn’t choose Perl for a new project nor do I want to work on existing Perl code, but I don’t hate it. In fact there’s a lot to like about it.
I would guess most programmers have favorites but don’t hate other languages.
they do not say “don’t use stack overflow.” and they primarily castigate library designers who don’t properly deprecate insecure or otherwise outdated apis.
And yet it continues to happen constantly. And Stack Overflow continues to abet it.
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Selecting for readability, what’s your preferred language?
This isn’t based on Stack Overflow, but on Stack Overflow Careers profiles, i.e. people stating what they don’t want to work with. Someone skipped reading the article 
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Certainly one of the most popular languages to hate on by users of less popular languages.
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Programmers who don’t know how to use the work of others who came before them are idiots, plain and simple, and are wasting their and their company’s time, to boot.
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for argument’s sake, so do libraries. i can pull almost any programming book off the shelf, real or virtual, and it will some contain bad practices and bad advice – often due to the march of time, sometimes due to poor authorship.
i’m not going to fault the libraries, and i’m not going to fault the patrons.
the mind-set that a person can get all their answers from a single source would be bad. stack overflow is a useful tool, among many.
novice programmers should be given the warning that it’s not the be all and end all; but, it can help people learn.
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Yeah, you got me, but does this mean nobody did not want to work with Lisp?
Ok, I see: “…all of which have at least 2,000 mentions on Developer Stories…”
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My experience of Perl is that it doesn’t stick with me. The number of times I’ve learned it is only ever temporarily greater than the number of times I’ve forgotten it, both currently at five. (Maybe this is a personal failing. But it comes back fast enough.)
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Interesting portrayal of bias in that graph. Delphi is most likely hated due to its roots in Pascal, yet C# is much loved even though the two languages were nearly identical before so much syntactical sugar was added to C#.
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(Honestly!) I just got bored, clicked on “Random” in XKCD, and this came up:
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extreme coincidence… I saw this post while taking a break from hate-coding some Perl just now.
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And, it is a great resource to get quickly past the stupid shit like inconsistent method naming. Is it “findall”, “matchall”, or “searchall”? Let’s find out without having to wade through an enormous amount of bullshit…
https://www.google.com/search?q=python+regular+expression+find+all+matches
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Maybe because zero software engineers actually use it?
