Comment by lesuorac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lesuorac | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The articles theory that old code is what determines if a language is loved / dreaded is really severely flawed. 5 of the most loved languages are ancient (Python, JS, Sql, Shell, HTML) and also all have reputations of having hacked (i.e. poor maintability) together code.

Additional the top loved programming languages are beyond 10 years old which means there's going to be plenty of 3yr old codebases for people to be programming in. So quite trivially it's not that the languages are too new to have old crusty codebase ...

> The TOP 15 Loved Programming Languages > Rust, TypeScript, Python, Kotlin, Go, Julia, Dart, C#, Swift, JavaScript, SQL, Shell, HTML, Scala, and Haskell.

Rust is 2015 (8 years), TS is 2012 (10 years), Python is 1991 (32 years), Kotlin is 2011 (12 years), Go is 2009 (13 years), Julia is 2012 (11 years), Dart is 2011 (11 years), C# is 2000 (23 years ago), Swift is 2014 (9 years ago), JS is 1995 (27 years), SQL is 1970?? (50 years), HTML is 1993 (30 years), Scala is 2004 (19 years), and Haskell is 1990 (33 years).

---

ObjC and or Swift really should be in the Green languages column as well; what's he going to do new projects on iOS using? I think also many people would keep Java / C#|C++ in the Green column as well. SQL also would be in the green column. Moving 3 languages from Brown to Green really skews the later pie charts.

You're missing the important point that in OP's hypothesis, it doesn't matter how old the language is, but how long it's been popular.

Python and Dart, for example, have been much more popular recently than in the past, so it's reasonable to assume that the percentage of newer code bases in those languages is higher than in, say, Java. Python may have been popular already 10 years ago, but it feels like back then it was mostly used for small websites and scripting, things you don't normally need to maintain for a long time.

> So quite trivially it's not that the languages are too new to have old crusty codebase ...

Considering the year a language was created is missing the point the author tried to make, unfortunately, so I would say your argument is based on a flawed premise (trivially shown by reading the article and understanding it).

I think JS is the only language that goes against this, but that's quite easy to explain: it's a language used mostly for web development, where it's practically, your only choice (notice that "loved" actually means having intent to continue using it in the future).

No the author didn't read the methodology of the Stack Overflow Survey nor did they notice they can get the historical CSV of the survey going back to 2011 [1] which literally tells the number of respondents per language (as-in how popular it is; no secondary population from TIBOE needed). Nor do they seem to understand (unlike you who does understand) that Loved and Dreaded have very specific meanings.

They did shoddy work and I'm calling them out on it. They very easily could've tried to use the past (then) 9 years of data to show that as a language gets more popular it became less loved; but they didn't.

The question of "If Java and Ruby appeared today, without piles of old rails apps and old enterprise Java applications to maintain, would they still be dreaded or would they be more likely to show up on the loved list?" is answered.

It's a no. For 2020, Ruby was 4.5% and Java was 8.8% of developer's "Wanted" languages while Go (17.9%), Rust (14.6%), TypeScript (17.0%), Python (30.0% !!). Sure a lot of people would like Ruby and Java (there already are actually a lot of them) but when you're not at the top of the Wanted it's going to be very hard to get to the top of Loved.

[1]: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/

> but when you're not at the top of the Wanted it's going to be very hard to get to the top of Loved.

Loved is based on people who use it. Wanted based on wanting to use it. They are separate.

I surmise that love or hate for a language is closely coupled with its stdlib. My favorite languages (Elixir, Rust) have some of the best standard libraries (and even, Go, for instance, includes JSON encoding and decoding in its own). This shields developers from code bases that need to constantly reinvent the wheel or pull in many dependencies for simple tasks. JavaScript is on the cusp here with a bad standard lib that has improved (in some ways) over the last 15 years.

I think a further nuance (if I'm understanding the author) is that a language you are likely to use starting from scratch is going to be more loved. While there is plenty of shell code out there, it is more common to write a shell script from scratch than it is to start a java project from scratch.

Python has been popular for 20 years, starting with Zope around 2000.

In 2003, CERN was already doing trainings for Python in scientific computing, and Grid jobs automation (what predated the cloud), I was one of the engineers that took part of the 2nd Python training, and Grid Computing Summer School 2003.

CERN build system for ATLAS/TDAQ used on those days, CMT, was written in Python.

No, I've been programming for more than 20 years and Python was definitely not popular back then. I remember early Google even bragged that they'd rather hire a Python developer than Java/C++ one, because there were no python courses so the candidate learned it by their own.

Wrong developer circles, then. What can I say.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zope - 1999

Dr Dobbs' Python Weekly URL, since 2000

Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award in 1999

"Guido van Rossum, creator of the Python programming language, and Donald Becker, chief investigator of the Beowulf Project, which achieved supercomputer performance using networks of inexpensive Linux-based PCs. "As creator of the Python programming language," Dr. Dobb's noted, "Guido van Rossum has given software developers a tool that addresses many of the shortcomings of more well-known and mainstream languages...Python makes it extremely easy to build complex data structures out of objects, lists, dictionaries, and the like. It is particularly useful for system administration, building GUIs, scripting, database programming, and rapid prototyping." Erickson detailed Donald Becker's contributions to the programming world by describing the problem Becker set out to solve: "One of the challenges in the realm of scientific computing is to efficiently and affordably handle large data sets," Erickson wrote. "To tackle the problem, Donald Becker and Thomas Sterling launched the Beowulf Project, a cluster computer consisting of high-performance PCs built from off-the-shelf components, connected via Ethernet, and running under Linux. Ultimately, the goal of the Beowulf approach was to achieve supercomputer (gigaflop) performance at PC prices."

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Dobb%27s_Excellence_in_Pro...

If something didn't seem popular because you have to be in the right circles to realise it's popularity, then maybe it wasn't that popular.

Yeah, because Dr. Dobbs used to give excellent awards to obscure technologies.

> Python and Dart, for example, have been much more popular recently than in the past, so it's reasonable to assume that the percentage of newer code bases in those languages is higher than in, say, Java.

And yet Python is the top fifth brown language? And also the top third loved language?

Dart is...popular?

Yes. Have a look at the StackOverflow tag, Flutter hashtag on X, GitHub projects, the Youtube Flutter Channel (which has a lot of videos, with a lot of views)... it's evidently used by a lot of people, but beware it's almost all due to Flutter.

Some people want their android and iOS and web apps to use the same code evade…

Note that HTML, Shell, and SQL appear in both the most loved and most dreaded lists.

I'm really surprised that JavaScript is not one of the most dreaded.

Old JS was weird and associated with cringy banners. By early 2000s it had declined sharply. I don't know why Google decided to revive that

I saw Ruby and SQL in the brown box, Js in the green box and stopped reading. Just last week I was getting annoyed with js bundlers trying to get a js library to work on the browser while fighting all the mess. Still feels like a big pile of duct taped components. Not the experience I have with Perl, a "brown" language.

Erlang not loved. Sad to see.

I don't think many new iOS apps are done in Objective-C.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com