Article 36MFC The most disliked programming language

The most disliked programming language

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John
from John D. Cook on (#36MFC)

According to this post from Stack Overflow, Perl is the most disliked programming language.

I have fond memories of writing Perl, though it's been a long time since I used it. I mostly wrote scripts for file munging, the task it does best, and never had to maintain someone else's Perl code. Under different circumstances I probably would have had less favorable memories.

Perl is a very large, expressive language. That's a positive if you're working alone but a negative if working with others. Individuals can carve out their favorite subsets of Perl and ignore the rest, but two people may carve out different subsets. You may personally avoid some feature, but you have to learn it anyway if your colleague uses it. Also, in a large language there's greater chance that you'll accidentally use a feature you didn't intend to. For example, in Perl you might use an array in a scalar context. This works, but not as you'd expect if you didn't intend to do it.

I suspect that people who like large languages like C++ and Common Lisp are more inclined to like Perl, while people who prefer small languages like C and Scheme have opposite inclinations.

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