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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

And the award of least significant poll of the week goes to...

Seriously, you won't get anything meaningful out of this, people will vote for the language they like and then bash the usual suspects (PHP, actionscript, C++,...). Also they will browse the first 20 entries or so and then get bored and skip to the end.

I'm sure the people who "dislike cobol" (7 people at the moment) have intimate knowledge of the language in production in order to cast such a vote.

It's just a popularity contest and a bad one at that.

Also: "Other - Dislike: 5 points". Enough said.

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Polls like these are meant to be subjective and to encourage discussion. Dismissing them because they're not scientific kind of misses the point.

Also I see no reason why this is any more subjective than it claims—it's not asking for which language is some ill-defined notion of "best" but instead which ones people "like".

I think it's perfectly reasonable to dislike a language you've never used. You can't claim it's a "bad" language (for reasons perhaps even above not having a definition for "bad") but I can't claim that you don't dislike it.

That fact that people are disliking languages they've never used is one of the reasons I'd agree the poll is meaningless. Sure, it's reasonable to dislike a language for whatever reason, but that doesn't mean that the results of such a free form poll can be interpreted in any meaningful way.

You can dislike a language for a number of reasons that have little to do with using it while still being meaningful. e.g. community behaviour, community style, and relative number of security flaws in products that use that language.

Who cares, it's interesting. It's cool to just to gauge the general sentiment of the languages on HN.

There are several ways to find meaning in the results. I claim it is a(some what sloppy, non scientific) measurement of PL bias in the HN community.

There's going to be the common blabber and hating on the usual suspects but polls like this tend to be good ways to bring up a general topic and let everyone discuss. Maybe it would've been better in a AskHN but at least here we get a list to reference (and for people to get angry at what's missing, people love getting angry). Also, it gives a view of what this specific community in this specific thread feels and adds to the context when reading other threads.

I don't think it usually creates interesting discussion. Just a billion of comments with no replies along the line of "XXX is great!" "YYY sucks!".

Everybody talks and nobody listens. It's just pointless popularity contest.

You have no idea what you're talking about. XXX is terrible. The new release of YYY has solved a lot of the problems that most people complain about.

None of the ideas in YYY are new. It's a mundane and vulgar rehash of things we already had in the ZZZ in 80s but done badly. OK, so the world's largest sites run YYY -- that's pure luck, not science. Or the fault corporate HR drones that don't know better asking for YYY skills. Or a massive conspiracy. Or maybe programmers just are dumber now than 10 years ago.

How can YYY even be taken seriously when not supporting homobubonic retroviral proto-smurfs? In fact, I've just written a nice tutorial on smurfs in ZZZ and how smurfs are just like smurfs -- once you are past that, writing a complex application like a "20 questions" game should not be a problem.

Don't get me started on dynamic versus static smurfing!

You forgot to say "I don't get why anyone is surprised by..", to get the full HN bingo card.

Polls like this are the equivalent of asking a builder if he likes wood, metal, concrete, plywood, slate, etc. Or if he likes a saw more than a hammer.

Which only a complete moron would do.

That's only a valid comparison if you're really big into polyglot programming AND believe that all languages are great in their own special way.

My thought exactly. Actually I was think - "geez, these people are such hipsters". Everyone loves the "cool" languages - Scala, Haskell, etc. But of course the lame languages suck (Java). Though I was pleasantly surprised to see the love for C#. It's a very nice language and you'd think being from MS it wouldn't be "cool".

That's a dismissive attitude. I think the love shown to C# is example enough that there may be more to the results than hipster-ism. C# is great, and the vast majority of Java programmers are aware of that. I mean, holy shit - no lambadas? Lack of reified types? The Java ecosystem is amazing (build tools, libraries, the JVM, IDE's), but the language itself is depressingly stagnant and unpleasant to work with in comparison to similarly-placed languages.

But perhaps the cool languages of today are cool precisely because they offer real advantages. Maybe they're advantageous only in our unique historical moment. That has yet to be seen. If their popularity fades over time, that won't mean they were simply hipster fads. It could just as easily mean they met significant needs at one point in time, but the needs changed, or we developed better tools that met those same needs.

As long as we can agree that Java is cool whatever this poll says ;-)

Based on this poll Java is not cool and most likely doesn't offer real advantages...

Yeah, that one perplexed me. I don't think anyone can deny Java's usefulness. I guess a lot of the hate is from people who find Java useful but still annoying. For my part, I don't think it's bad at all. When I use Java, I miss conveniences like `people.map { |p| [p.name, p.address] }`. But in exchange for typing more characters, Java gives me a huge ecosystem, good docs, effortless cross-platform coding, and pretty much the only hassle-free GUI API.

Why not use Clojure or another JMV language and get the same ecosystem at similar or less characters?

    (map (juxt :name :address) people)

Maturity and longevity, mostly. For really serious projects, I prefer to mitigate my risk by picking something that's been mainstream for a long time and isn't likely to die off. I'm not saying Clojure, Scala, JRuby, etc. are going to die off. Just that it's too early to tell.

Also, it's not exactly the same ecosystem. Yes, you can use all the Java libraries. But the ecosystem also includes the dev environment/build system, the written material, and the peopleware associated with the language. You don't automatically import all of these from Java just because you're using the JVM.

Scala enables you to keep most of the Java ecosystem (API, docs, cross-platform, and swing is even nicer in scala), and you can do `people.map { p => (p.name, p.address) }`, granted that the IDEs have to get a plugin installed before they are as helpful, but both Eclipse and IntelliJ has awesome scala plugins.

I don't see so much hate in the current results for languages that offer few or no real advantages. It seems to me that most of the hate is directed at languages that are often mandated by external forces, whether those be bosses, target platforms or simply lack of alternatives within a niche.

What's the concern? Is there any reason why disliking a language for reasons of fashion is bad?

I personally think that I'd maybe prefer not to work with someone who likes (and argues) for languages due to fashion... but I'm also a by-day-and-night Haskell developer, so I imagine that invalidates my opinion in some ways.

Fashion-based-programming leads to endless re-invented wheels and more effort going into running round in circles than looking a bit into history and learning from it. Ruby and Python seem to live in parallel, separate worlds. Oh look, here comes Node.js where everything's written again, this time in JS.

I'm not arguing for monoculture but it's a bit sad to see isolated communities not working together.

Haskell is an example of a language which a good reason to exist: solid unique PL qualities and is also highly applicable to specific problems.

I like Ruby and have been programming heavily in it for the last year.

However I still think Java and C are really good languages. I appreciate the niceties of both strongly-typed compiled languages, along with the 'coolness' factor of the dynamic languages.

And who can't love VB for getting shit done (at least back in the day). Though I can see if we are just focusing on the language.

My biggest problem with VB was inconsistency. There were multiple flavors floating around with subtle incompatibilities, so you couldn't always reuse code without modifications. Also, it did some weird things with types. Like error messages along the lines of "Type mismatch: expected string, but got string."

If VB6/VBA weren't coupled to the god awful IDEs and completely unversionable/patchable binary formats of their applications, it would be a pretty decent programming language.

It's persisted - absurdly - in spite of those crippling issues.

The VB6 IDE was Ok for 1998, but 1998 was a long time ago.

I still use VB6/VBA to get shit done, but only because I have a bunch of code & tools I've already written in or for it. I can see how it would be pretty useless to most people.

Registry-free COM has solved all of the versioning issues for me.

Language-wise, I find it's limitations to be its strength - kind of like ouilipo for programming.

Just curious, why are people bashing Actionscript? The language itself is based on Javascript and Javascript isn't getting so much hate. I know everyone hates Flash now... maybe I just still have a soft spot in my heart for programming Flash-based games back in the day.

I marked dislike on Actionscript because of AS3. Actionscript is basically Javascript, but with Actionscript 3 they added type annotations for static typing features. IMO, it did not fit in well with the language, and the integration between the two worlds (static vs dynamic typing) was poorly handled.

1/ Because it's at the top of the list and people are more likely to cast a vote

2/ Because most people (myself included) don't know actionscript but think Actionscript == Flash and downvote based on that.

There needs to be some way to differentiate people that hate a language for some external reason (anti-MS, anti-Apple, anti-Flash) or those who hate it from having used it. I suspect Java has more dislikes from actual users, where Actionscript and Perl get their dislikes from people who have never gone full time in either language.

Based on the numbers that I see, JavaScript is disliked more than ActionScript. When you take into account people's general dislike for anything flash related and how few people know anything about the language I think it did ok. What would be interesting would be to see a poll of the different versions of ECMAScript proposals and see what the public thinks of the real language differences between each. Classes are coming and structs are proposed and many of the things that ActionScript has had for a while are also leaking into JavaScript like rest arguments, and proxy objects. Overall I think ES6 is clearer and more flexible and I'm cool with omitting types unless you are doing things like types arrays and so on. ActionScript will go away over time and over time JavaScript environments will catch up even if they are still way behind in many respects today.

> Based on the numbers that I see, JavaScript is disliked more than ActionScript

Not now: AS has an 84% dislike rate to JS' 39%.

Classes without any kind of type checking are worthless imho. I would have prefered implicit interfaces instead of classes.

Actionscript has basically no error checking. It'll check for syntax errors and that about it - every other error manifests as a strange bug or "why the F* is nothing happening!?!" Then you spend an hour tracking it down and discover the cause was some trivial thing that any normal language would have simply raised a compiler error for in the first place.

And on top of that, its libs are very callback-heavy even in places where a synchronous option should have been available, so even very basic sequential code sometimes gets turned into a messy chain of callbacks.

That's why I made a beeline for the "ActionScript - Dislike" button.

Are you serious? When's the last time you used ActionScript, 2004? Modern AS3 compiled using the FlexSDK is a proper development environment with compile-time errors for types and all. Combined with a debug player, you get both compile-time and runtime errors.

It certainly has a hell of a lot more error checking going on than something like JavaScript by the virtue of being a statically typed language first with dynamic stuff second.

That's not to say that obscure bugs don't exist in the runtime as with every other runtime ever, but don't misrepresent something you don't seem to be well versed in.

The same reason everyone was down on Javascript 10 years ago: The development tools, APIs, and runtime were unpleasant. Unfortunately for flash developers it doesn't look actionscript will be following in Javascript's footsteps.

Also, in most cases, is it the actual programming language we hate or is it the code we've seen written by people who had no concept of the language that we hate?

Or maybe people have only programmed in one particular implementation of a programming language, e.g. Rubinius, Codehaus Groovy, or IBM Cobol.

What other Groovy implementations are there?

Since like|dislike is orthogonal to bad|good (how do you really define any one of the four anyway?) this poll can capture a decent sampling of current opinions about languages, from a fairly relevant subset of <the world>, and present at least a little more info than just dry feature comparisons. My two cents.

I voted "COBOL - dislike" because I actually work with it (although it was missspellt "Cobol").

Well, the like/dislike are totally subjective things. I can't tell if I like or dislike most of the languages of the list because I don't use them or, in some cases, I don't use them enough to have a strong opinion.

For me it's a perfect answer to the question "Why there are so many programming languages ? ".

It's quite silly asking such a subjective question, but aren't most polls just that, subjective?

Human experience is subjective. It makes no sense to make an objective poll.

Sampling bias and memory issues aside, you can make an objective poll. "Have you ever eaten oatmeal?"

I can only speak for myself, but I marked languages I liked that I've used enough to say like/dislike. The only one I disliked was ruby, which is something I've done enough in to know one way or the other. Overall I ended up with a bunch of likes and only one dislike.

All programming languages claim to be better than that "Other" language!

Not all.

Lisp doesn't claim to be better (it is often argued that it's worse). But what Lisp does right, it's meta programming, therefore letting the plain programmer improve the language himself.

So while as you suggest, all programming language will have warts and stumbling blocks, possibly deal breaker problems, that you can't do anything about, in Lisp, you can always and usually very easily overcome them yourself, with a little meta programming.

Lisp is not the best programming language, but what you make of lisp is the best programming language for you and your domain.

What if the "deal breaker problem" is all of the parentheses? ;)

No one who seriously gives Lisp a chance ends up disliking it because of the parens. It's about as reasonable as disliking C/C++ because of semi-colons. It's a superficial thing to criticize because you obviously haven't actually given the language a shot.

Given all the weird syntax people put up with in other languages I don't really get the complaint.

You are absolutely correct. That being said, I "disliked" COBOL as I used to be a mainframe programmer. It's a foul, foul language, but ironically, owes much of its success to that (long story).

The like:dislike ratio is a metric with some information, as well as the absolute numbers of votes (for mindshare).

oh I would just be as happy to label anything case sensitive as something I don't like. Easy as that.

>Seriously, you won't get anything meaningful out of this, people will vote for the language they like and then bash the usual suspects (PHP, actionscript, C++,...)

Why do you insist that is not meaningful? Of course they will vote for the language they like, that is the purpose of the poll. Obviously people can vote from ignorance, but that goes both ways. Just as some people "dislike" cobol despite a lack of experience with it, so too do people "like" PHP despite a lack of experience with it.

The point is that the opinion of someone who has used a language and platform is of inherently more value when judging said platform than the opinion of someone who is coming from a position of total ignorance. In this sense your statement is a logical fallacy.

Actually not in a case like this.

This is not a pool for finding what is the "Best Language" (best language for what ?), but a pool to find what languages programmers like or dislike.

That is a matter of personal taste and opinion and there is not a wrong or a right answer.

Obviously if you have never seen or used or looked at the language you shouldn't vote on what other people say, but you don't really need to know the ins and out to make a personal decision.

I never held that there was a right or wrong answer, however the purpose of a poll is to infer value to the people reading it (otherwise the OP might as well write it on a piece of paper and put it in a drawer).

The definition of "like" the verb is "To find agreeable, enjoyable, satisfactory". The key word in that definition is find. How can someone "like" (in the true meaning of the word) something, or for that matter "dislike" something, if they have never "found" (/used) that something in the first place.

Therefore it is incorrect to say that you personally like or dislike something if you have not had direct exposure to that something. At most it would be correct to say that others in your peer/social group like or dislike something.

Your statement is a non-sequitur. In no sense does that make my statement a logical fallacy.

My statement is absolutely relevant to yours. Also, see my comment above. The technical definition of "like" requires someone to have "found" (/used in this context) the thing that they are "liking". Therefore it is incorrect to say you actually dislike something from a position of 0 exposure to it.

This may seem like petty semantics however it is no worse than preaching to others from a position of ignorance.

I think you mean "like" PHP despite experience with it.

>Also they will browse the first 20 entries or so and then get bored and skip to the end.

Why would I need to browse down the list? Nobody here has used every language in existence. You hit ctrl-F and cast your vote on your favorite and least favorite.

Agreed. Unfortunately its posts like these that have become the norm here.

There will be obvious winners and losers, but I'm interested in the long tail results.

The poll quantifies a community's thoughts as only the vocal minority comment while the majority lurks. It provides a snapshot for comparison with other communities or even to Hacker News 18 months ago.

Language threads will provide more insightful commentary, but a general poll is useful for macro trend discussion.

I think it's very interesting to see some changes in the Hacker News community. For example, CoffeeScript's like/dislike ratio seems to be much lower now that 18 months ago. I bet some articles had an important impact in its popularity. Same would happen with MongoDB for example. It'd be nice to run this kind of poll every month, and try to correlate with specific articles that changed the mindset of the community.

For me at least I liked the concept of CoffeeScript, but had a couple issues with the implementation. I was originally very interested in it, but after experimenting with it for a little while decided not to use it as I felt it didn't really gain anything over using a particular style/subset of javascript itself.

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