What programming language do you hate the most?

[choroba]

Assembly

 38/6%

C

 24/4%

Cobol

 21/3%

C#

 12/2%

C++

 28/4%

Fortran

 8/1%

Go

 4/1%

Haskell

 13/2%

Java

 114/17%

JavaScript

 47/7%

Perl

 111/16%

Perl6

 33/5%

PHP

 51/7%

Python

 45/7%

Ruby

 6/1%

Rust

 4/1%

Unixish Shell Scripting languages

 21/3%

Visual Basic

 80/12%

Other (post in comments)

 24/4%

684 total votes

[Munkey]

I disagree with PHP being listed as a programming language, so I picked that.

[stevieb]

I really needed a laugh after how horribly bad my work day has been :)

[Munkey]

Sorry to hear about your horrible work day. I really hope you didn't have to spend it untangling a mess of PHP 'syntax' ;)

[Anonymous Monk]

I agree in disagreeing!

[loonybaloney]

I am LITERALLY on the floor laughing at this.

[pryrt]

DOS/Win cmd.exe batch files. If you think Linux csh/sh scripts are bad, just try to do the same in a .bat :-)

[LanX]

Full ack.

But both don't really count as general purpose languages.

[Laurent_R]

Hi,

I chose Cobol because my personal experience with it was terrible: in the first (or perhaps second, not sure anymore) year of University, we were supposed to write Cobol programs, but had no access to a Cobol compiler and related environments, so that the whole thing was just purely theoretical, a brain experiment, so to speak, with no chance to actually run a program. I guess this is not something against Cobol per se, but more about bad organization in our tech school. Fortunately, I could write (simple) programs in at least three other programming languages at the time (Basic, Pascal and C), so that was not too crippling; if it had not been for this other experience with programming, I think it might have dissuaded me completely from studying IT. Having said that, even if we had had a Cobol compiler, I think I would have hated it: so verbose, so inefficient (in terms of code writing efficiency, that is), so boring, so picky, and so on. The funny thing, though, is that I completed that teaching unit with a more than decent mark, I still don't understand how this could happen. Anyway, I'm really happy that I've never had to use it again afterwards.

If Cobol had not been in the list, I could have chosen a couple more which I really don't like: PHP and Javascript for a start, and, to a lesser extent and for different reasons, Java. Nowadays, I would also really avoid assembly, but that's because it has been so many years I did some that I would have to learn again almost everything.

The others languages are more or less fine to me, to different degrees. My favorites are, of course and in no particular order, Perl (5) and Perl 6.

[karlgoethebier]

"...write Cobol programs, but had no access to a Cobol compiler..."

No problem. Remember Alan. He had only paper, pencil and probably scissors.

[Laurent_R]

Sure, but, you know, I hate to say that, but I am afraid that I am far from being as smart as Alan (at the same time, if he had been forced to use Cobol for his celebrated Turing Machine, it might very well have killed his creativity).

Besides, I wholeheartedly agree with Anonymous Monk quoting Arthur Clarke just above, it is so frustrating. ;-)

[Anonymous Monk]

Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.
Arthur C. Clarke

[Discipulus]

Ah!, there are also other programming languages, beside Perl? I perceived rumors about this, but I always supposed to be just rumors..

Anyway I hate no language, I simply and happily ignore them cause I know a bit of Perl and and I'm happy with it.

I have adversion against bad implementations, against programs with bugs, against clutterly designed web interfaces, against developpers who say: "this is a black box for me; this is a library limit i cannot do anything; you have reason but just in a perfect world.."

I have no simpathy for PHP because it stolen Perl the web primate, but if you see it from left probably because of PHP and Ruby now we have PSGI, plack, mojolicious, dancer and company.

Perl is so good that there is no space for hate.

Hate is a sentiment worth to be proved against few other things, for sure no programming languages.

L*

[karlgoethebier]

"...there are also other programming languages..."

Yes, for sure. Sometimes things go wrong but see the best program ever written in C.

[Laurent_R]

Anyway I hate no language

Because you don't know any other, according to your own admission.

If you knew any other, maybe you would hate Perl. ;-) Or maybe you would hate the other ones that you know.

OK, I don't like too much the word "hate" here, I would have preferred "dislike". But once we get past this terminology issue, I can tell you that there are a few languages that I really dislike, because I have had to use them. Only a handful of them, among that three dozens or so languages which I have used over the last 35 years or so. Each language has its own warts, fine, I can live with that, but some are really irritating. Try brainfuck if you don't believe me.

[eyepopslikeamosquito]

No, really, I don't want an identification division. The problem with identification division is it really puts a crimp in Perl's poetry, or in Cobalt poetry. How many poems can you start off identification division? One.

-- Larry Wall, cited in The Lighter Side of Perl Culture (Part V): Poetry

Of the over twenty programming languages I've used over the years, the two I dislike most are COBOL and PHP.

As indicated by Larry's quote above, writing poetry in COBOL is not fun. Ditto for playing golf. Though its English-like syntax should help in writing poetry, being developed by the US Department of Defense, and heavily used in business, finance and administration, puts a bit of a crimp on having fun. Having said that, Larry's quote above does appear to have provoked a COBOL poem!

grinder highlights COBOL's breathtaking verbosity in his classic A++:

use Cobol;
PROCEDURE DIVISION
ADD 1 TO A GIVING B
MOVE B TO A

When forced to use COBOL on an IBM mainframe back in the 1980s, I remember being appalled by its oppressive verbosity ... and shocked to learn that there was no such thing as a local variable!

Though I enjoyed playing golf in PHP -- due to its many quirks, inconsistencies and bugs -- I was appalled by its seemingly random, ad hoc design (as detailed in the references below).

Oh, and I also hate seeing a "small" Unix shell script grow into a 5000-line, unmaintainable monster. To avoid this, write all non-trivial scripts in Perl to begin with.

• The Lighter Side of Perl Culture (Part V): Poetry
• Unleashing the inner Pablo (COBOL Poem provoked by Larry's quote above)
• More poetry in COBOL
• Your Language Sucks (Theory.org wiki)
• PHP in contrast to Perl
• Why PHP Sucks
• The PHP Singularity
• PHP: a fractal of bad design
• The golf course looks great, my swing feels good, I like my chances (Part III)
• Should I give up Perl?
• Unix shell versus Perl

[Tux]

• Other: SQL

My hate is that there are too many standards in SQL and there is no single standard that is supported by all mainstream databases, and they even differ per release.

Additionally, (mainstream) database get shipped where the default is to not respect the ANSI standard, because (they state) it (the standard) is slowing down (performance), so you have to set options to make it comply to the standard(s) so you can write portable (ahum) SQL.

BTW, IMHO there is no perfect database. They all suck in some way. Maybe a new poll: Which database sucks most (and why).

[LanX]

While I agree about the critic I don't think SQL belongs into this list of "programing languages".

It's hardly Turing complete (see SO is-sql-or-even-tsql-turing-complete ) and rarely used as such.

More an embedded external DSL for querying data.

HTML, CSS and regexes are other examples of DSLs which are not really typical programming languages.

[chacham]

and rarely used as such.

You should visit SQL forums more often. :P

[karlgoethebier]

"...new poll..Which database sucks most..."

No new poll needed here:

• Oracle
• Sybase
• MySQL
• MSSQL
• Other

Order doesn't really matter...

[jczeus]

VARCHAR2 :-/

[chacham]

VARCHAR2

Fwiw, the Oracle documentation for VARCHAR2 states: The VARCHAR datatype is synonymous with the VARCHAR2 datatype. To avoid possible changes in behavior, always use the VARCHAR2 datatype to store variable-length character strings.

Oracle has a known issue where there is no distinction between NULL and a zero-length string. However, they called this VARCHAR2, as "one day" they will remove this distinction in VARCHAR. It's a stupid implementation on their part, but at least they flagged their own stupidity and have plans for a brighter future.

[LanX]

• Python

  Was my second vote, because of bad experiences.

  1. it's very restrictive, how can you claim to be allow multiple paradigms like functional programing, and restrict lambdas ( i.e. anonymous subs) to one statement?

  2. misconceptions thru opinionated formatting ( pretty != good )

     When I once ran my first convoluted draft for my master thesis thru L^AT_EX I was very impressed how it started to look like serious mathematics while I knew it was just a shitty brainstorm.

     The same applies to Python, the worst bunch of code still looks like proper well designed software, because whitespace formatting is obligatory.

     While I wouldn't mind if we had a use tidy which forced Perl into a well defined perltidy format, it's leading to misconception.

     I hate those fanboys who code worse than a newbie but still judge their code by the format. You can't argue against stupidity.

  3. last time I looked into pypi it really smelled like pipi. No comparison to CPAN.

[perldigious]

Python... it's very restrictive.

This pun still makes me chuckle ever since I heard a coworker of mine express the same sentiment to me while trying to debug some of his own Python code.

[runrig]

Python... it's very restrictive.

This pun still makes me chuckle

If it were a pun it would be constrictive :-)

[dvnty]

I once spent 3 hours debugging a logic error in a Python program with an if clause becoming invisibly outdented by an editor automatically replacing tabs with some combination of spaces and tabs. Those were the last hours I spent using Python.

[LanX]

To be fair tabs are generally a problem, but surely more accentuated in Python.

[ptizoom]

I totally corroborate!

- also in python ... have you noticed....

• version 2.7 "stuffs" does not work on version 3... backward compatibility, like with mu*softs code, is thrown away to move on.
• there is a difference between " " and " " in the line openers.... why Guido van Rossum forgot blocks delimiters on the way ? As { parenthesis } are so much more beautiful, soothing and reassuring to code staring....a left bracket always leads you gently, raising from a humble beginning, to the rewarding right logical end of ones algorithm's journey...but python lets you in the void of empty spaces...

[karlgoethebier]

PostScript

% Quicksort
%
% Chris Collins <[e-mail]>
% 17-Sep-2001

/qsort { dup length 1 gt { << exch /xlt [ ] /xgt [ ] /x 6 5 roll dup 0
+ get 
exch dup length 1 sub 1 exch getinterval /xs exch >> begin 0 1 xs leng
+th 1 
sub { xs exch get dup x lt exch [ exch 3 2 roll { xlt aload pop ] /xlt
+ } { 
xgt aload pop ] /xgt } ifelse exch store } for [ xlt qsort aload pop x
+ xgt
qsort aload pop ] end } if } def


[ 5 2 5 7 9 3 ] qsort ==
[ 3 5 2 1 5 2 9 6 3 5 7 ] qsort ==

[LanX]

> PostScript
• Forth
I suppose you are objecting against the reverse Polish notation which PostScript inherited from Forth.

I've certainly met many fans of the ways of the old HP calculators...

edit

OH, shiny!!!!! Reverse Polish Lisp deserves to be revived again in an ACME module... :)

[karlgoethebier]

".... old HP calculators...revived..."

He! BTW, they are not dead. And some of my former colleagues still swear on them. It's very funny to watch these guys entering data on such a device in Lichtgeschwindigkeit ;-)

[LanX]

• Shell scripting

  Was my vote, mostly because I don't really know most of the other suspects.

  While I love using *sh on the command line for its expressiveness, it becomes a real mess when designing scripts/programs.

  Many things rely on shelling out and break compatibility, some *sh even require to call test for boolean expressions.

  Documentation is hard to find, just one unqueryable big file for bash.

  How many users know that bash supports arrays?

  Or how to define functions?

  Many will differ because bash is their daily workhorse and because of the close relationship to Perl.

  Point is that "Perl started as *sh on steroids" (quoting Frido) and solved many of the issues.

  Unfortunately Perl never really successfully attacked the interactive niche of shell, while carrying all the DNA of shell, awk, sed and regex (unlike Python)

  In other words most of the critic towards Perl applies much more to Shell.

[herveus]

Howdy!

I chose Python because I find the reliance on white space to be really heinous.

On the other hand, I construed the question pretty precisely and narrowly. There are other languages on the list that I would be more cranky about having to work with (C# or VB, for example). And my choice might be different if I were familiar with more of the languages on the list.

[karlgoethebier]

BTW, a web server written in PostScript (untested):

Read more... (6 kB)

As i vaguely remember i stumbled over this example (or something similar) by chance many years ago - and couldn't believe it.

See also SQL Mandelbrot Set and Turing engine in Oracle SQL. N.B.: I cannibalized some of the links LanX provided.

[LanX]

• Lisp (#like)

  I think Lisp is missing in that list, but while struggling to read it I don't hate it. (Others will certainly differ)

  While being one of the two oldest languages it's still alive and very influential.

  Learning Lisp made me a better programmer and most of my struggles seem to be related to arcane properties of eLisp.

  (I recommend reading Higher Order Perl)

  Should be mentioned that Larry mentioned Lisp as one of his influences while designing Perl.

[no_slogan]

Re: C++
Y'all might recognize this guy.

It is a thin hope, but at least now I can look forward to the possibility that Stroustrup might someday announce that C++ itself had been a similar joke.

[davies]

The Register suggests a reason why Perl was voted the most hated language at one point. And it's a reason I like.

Regards,

John Davies

[karlgoethebier]

ADA because of the rocket crash, the miserable IDE and not having adamonks.org as well as and CAAN.

[nicknash]

RPG - it is miserable!

[chacham]

RPG - it is miserable!

Really? When i see RPG, i think, like, WoW.

[nicknash]

If it were that RPG, I'd be all onboard... Alas, RPG the programming language is a nightmare.

[smknjoe]

Haters are gonna hate, but why are you guys dissing on Perl, on the Perlmonks website no less?

What's this world coming to?

LOL, Joe W.

[LanX]

2 reasons
1. sense of humor
2. system is broken (multiple votes allowed)
;)

update

3. anonymous votes are allowed

[smknjoe]

#1. Sense of humor. I know, I was just trying to be funny as well. I thought the number of Perl votes itself was pretty humorous. Joe W.

[chacham]

My worst experience language wise was in Progress 7. I hated the language almost as soon as i started using it, and dreaded it from then on. Luckily, it was only a one-off thing i had to do in it. But wow, i still remember how horrible the experience was ~20 years later.

[karlgoethebier]

PHP because of it's booleans and a lot of other crap.

[Anonymous Monk]

Can you explain more deeply what bothers you in PHP booleans ?

[karlgoethebier]

"...explain more deeply..."

No, not really. Most of this i've suppressed. But see also Bad Design and Why PHP sucks.

[Ralesk]

I guess Perl6 is at 0 because nobody actually uses it?

[Anonymous Monk]

Well, now it is even funnier, two of the most hated languages are Perl languages.

[Anonymous Monk]

powershell

[LanX]

Perl 7 ...

Faster than JS, optional typing, backwards compatible...

But I can't get it installed!