What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

&gt; Git might be a source of frustration to many developers (it certainly is for me!), but it’s rare that people admit it on their resume ...<p>That statement doesn&#x27;t make a lot of sense. The &quot;dislike&quot; tag is understood to be the list of things you don&#x27;t want to work with (as in, &quot;don&#x27;t contact me about jobs if the job involves using xxxx tool&#x2F;tech&#x2F;language&quot;). Resumes don&#x27;t generally have a section for &quot;sometimes frustrating&#x2F;tricky stuff that I don&#x27;t even question that I&#x27;ll be using.&quot;<p>You just can&#x27;t ignore the alternatives (or lack thereof) to any of the &quot;disliked&quot; stuff in the article.<p>The running theme in the strong dislikes are languages and tech that were once popular but have been surpassed by newer, easier to use or work with alternatives. That may happen one day to git, but it would seem a long way off.<p>There&#x27;s also a running theme of the dislikes often representing working with older legacy code. So the listed languages might just be the devs&#x27; proxy for disliking working with legacy projects (vba strikes me as an example of this, since it was hugely popular but no one is really using it in anything new).

The article defines &quot;like&quot; vs &quot;dislike&quot; in terms of what developers list as preferences on their jobs profile. For example, Perl is the most &quot;disliked&quot; language; what that really means is that developers have actively listed it as a job opportunity they don&#x27;t want.<p>The analysis shows that there is a correlation between a language&#x27;s &quot;liked-ness&quot; and its growth as a tag on Stack Overflow. Correlation-is-not-causation and all that, though it seems that what developers will take for a job is similar to what they actively use. This, of course, is rather cyclic.

Earlier in my career we moved to Ruby over PHP because Ruby was &quot;cool&quot; and PHP was not. Now it is interesting to see them lumped in the same group. Incidentally, PHP has improved greatly because of the rivalry with Ruby because the competition inspired PHP and PHP Frameworks to step up their game in the early 2000s &#x2F; 2010s.<p>Python&#x27;s continued popularity surprises me. While I like Python and it is good for data science I don&#x27;t understand why people use it for websites. The PHP and Ruby ecosystems are far more mature if you consider ease of use and if you are going for performance, Go and Java based frameworks are better. Even in the data world, I kind of like R over Python.<p>I&#x27;m also glad to see Javascript highly ranked. I was under the impression that Node.js in particular was going the way of PHP and Ruby. But personally I like working with Node.<p>Edit: I wonder how much of this is due to popularity too. PHP is insanely widely used. Which attracts more entry level coders than a language that is broadly used for specialty &#x2F; high performance &#x2F; niche languages.

I remember writing a cross-platform library for web authentication that worked with signed cookies. You would log in through a PHP form and then I wrote modules to check the cookie and refresh it in just about every language used in web development in the early 2000s. That included PHP, Perl, Java, C#, Cold Fusion, and others.<p>Of all the authentication modules, the one in Perl was the shortest and sweetest.

There might be a bias in this analysis. The programming languages listed in the no-no list are the one people dislike AND know. I can&#x27;t say if I dislike a language if I don&#x27;t know it. This is visible with r language.

The most fascinating section of this, in my opinion, is the &quot;Rivalries&quot; at the bottom that show the relationship between liking X and disliking Y.<p>However, what isn&#x27;t clear to me is whether this is one-directional or a blended bi-directional rivalry. For example, the third item from the bottom is iOS : Android. Is this the coefficient of liking iOS and disliking Android <i>or</i> is it a coefficient of liking either and disliking the other? Can anyone clarify that?

&gt; One tag that stands out is the functional language Clojure; almost nobody expresses dislike for it, but it’s still among the most rapidly shrinking (based on question visits, it only started shrinking in the last year or so)<p>That&#x27;s an interesting observation. Having learned Clojure this year without asking a single StackOverflow question, I don&#x27;t think this means Clojure is shrinking. I suspect that Clojure&#x27;s crazy good stability means no new questions are really required for core things.<p>Also, Clojure tends to not be anyone&#x27;s first language, if Clojure Conj is any indication. Most Clojure developers I&#x27;ve ever met have been programming for &gt; 10 years. Experienced programmers don&#x27;t tend to ask as many &quot;how do I do this in language X&quot; questions.

R is the most liked! I have to say that over the past 5 years the language has really just been getting better and better.<p>I know a lot of people have a bad taste with R but I blame the bad non-programmers that used the language but Hadley Wickham and his tidyverse has turned this DSL into one of the best languages to use for its purpose.

I&#x27;m surprised by JavaScript results. I expected it to rival Perl for top place.

On a positive note for a language to be hated on that list it had to be successful and big enough at some point to be useful ;)

The next step is obviously to take the most-disliked technologies and combine them into something so bad it&#x27;s good, like &quot;the most unwanted music&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-gPuH1yeZ08" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-gPuH1yeZ08</a>).

I love javascript, it&#x27;s basically the language I like working in the most after python, yet I expected it to be near the top of the disliked tags. Good, I guess, even if it does appear anyway.<p>Loving that postgresql, docker and python are so uniformly liked.<p>The backend&#x2F;frontend rivalries I found hilarious for some reason.

I&#x27;m surprised!<p>This would definitely not be my top, I guess someone&#x27;s top is mostly influenced by their own path.<p>I would definitely not list Ruby as a language I wouldn&#x27;t work with, it reads nicely and is very close to Python for me. Perl and PHP are somehow similar and reads nicely as well imo.<p>What I would have put up there are things like Lips and Scheme that are just a succession of parenthesis.<p>Probably Java would be the #1 thing I would refuse to work with.

Putting examples in the entry fields in the questionnaire seems like a leading question to me. When it says, &quot;Tech you prefer not to work with: e.g., javascript, c#, php&quot;, one is immediately going to thing, &quot;Well of course people hate javascript! So do I&quot; as opposed to letting the respondent decide for themselves which they least prefer.

Delphi is the one the surprised me most. Primarily because I can&#x27;t remember the last time I even encountered it.

I have to admit I never learned Lisp or any of its descendants. Its prefix operators seem nice because they can make your code more concise, but its endless parentheses make the language literally looks like ())

So a decline in language is causing people to avoid&#x2F;dislike it or a dislike of a language is causing the decline in popularity ?

Sad to see coffeescript so disliked. It has some bad choices, like the time-bomb-scoping, but it was a promising era for programming language syntax when coffeescript was in fashion.<p>But I guess most programming is mindless IDE-bingo where the least-common-denominator churns megabyte after megabyte of same repeating crap badly solving the same repeating problems, so it doesn&#x27;t really matter that the syntax is in your face hiding the logic all the time.

2nd chart seems more driven by fashion&#x2F;geek-cred than intrinsic language qualities.<p>Never met a Delphi expert who didn&#x27;t love it. Never met a C++ expert who didn&#x27;t have grave reservations about it. It&#x27;s like, &quot;Here&#x27;s your bag of infected needles. You can make really slick games with them, but <i>be careful</i>!&quot;<p>bash... WTF?

interesting outliers: csharp and bash should swap places, otherwise reaonable.

Why is ruby so disliked D:

C++

I could see myself using VBA more if the &quot;IDE&quot; was not a 20yo piece of crap that pops a MessageBox every time you have an error (I seem to always forget to add the &quot;then&quot; when writing an &quot;if&quot;).<p>Just underline the error but let me continue to code dammit.