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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
On Stack Overflow Jobs, you can create your own Developer Story to showcase your achievements and advance your career. One option you have when creating a Developer Story is to add tags you would like to work with or would not like to work with:
[...] The most disliked languages, by a fairly large margin, are Perl, Delphi, and VBA. They're followed by PHP, Objective-C, Coffeescript, and Ruby. On our team we're certainly happy to see that R is the least disliked programming language, relative to the number of people who liked it.
[...] Generally there is a relationship between a tag's growth and how often it's disliked. Almost everything disliked by more than 3% of stories mentioning it is shrinking in Stack Overflow traffic (except for the quite polarizing VBA, which is steady or slightly growing). And the least-disliked tags— R, Rust, Typescript and Kotlin— are all among the fast-growing tags (Typescript and Kotlin growing so quickly they had to be truncated in the plot).
Hate away, guys, you just make my skills and willingness to write perl more valuable.
Source: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 05 2017, @10:35PM (4 children)
NO LANGUAGE SHOULD BE 1-INDEXED. That is pure evil. Yes, Matlab/Octave are also evil because of this.
Arrays should start at 0, or they shouldn't start at all.
Also, typing "->" instead of "=" gets to be quite tedious when you have to do it a lot. Tutorials say you can use an equal sign instead of the arrow things "most" of the time, which isn't very reassuring.
For more information, see An Angry Introduction to R http://arrgh.tim-smith.us/ [tim-smith.us] and The R Inferno http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf [burns-stat.com]. (The R Inferno has a nasty habit of blaming the victim who is just trying to use the language like a sane person would.)
Oh! One more indication of sloppy design, off the top of my head: in R, you can define true to be false and false to be true! Genius.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @01:35AM
> Matlab/Octave are also evil because of this.
I believe they come by it honestly...from early FORTRAN.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday November 06 2017, @09:18AM (2 children)
Arrays should start at whatever the programmer decides it should start. While often 0-indexed arrays are the right choice, there are exceptions. And then it is better if you don't have to do all the index calculations yourself (and get them wrong).
This is one thing Pascal did right. You could have an array indexed from 0 to 2, from 1 to 3, from -1 to 1, or even indexed by a previously defined enumerated type, in which case it automatically had exactly the right number of entries, even if you changed the enumeration later, and moreover over a subrange of that type (e.g. if you had the enumeration (zero, one, two, three, four, five) then you could have an array indexed by two .. four.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Monday November 06 2017, @10:28AM (1 child)
But why call these things 'arrays'? Why not treat them as custom data-structures (i.e. just use classes), or have some other distinct language feature to give you what you want?
Seems to me far more sensible for the programming language to standardise on 0-based indexing for its array primitive.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday November 06 2017, @07:17PM
Because that's what they are?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.