The 10 most dreaded programming languages, according to a survey of 65,000 developers

[Dar Brett 0]

The only environments I dread have a cargo cult like following, and virtually no clue how the environments they're working in even function. JavaScript developers who don't understand how references or callbacks work. PHP developers who don't know what OO is, but they know they have to use every single OO feature. Java developers who have to user every single design pattern in every single project, but don't know what a heap or garbage collector is. True story: I worked on one Web App written in a combination of JavaScript and PHP that was over a million lines of code. I don't get why people hate VB so much though. Granted I only use it sporadically, but it's not like it's really hard to get the kind of work people want done in it done.

[Rage]

"Osmonian" *cough* *cough*

Do not escape reality : improve reality !

[Sander Rossel]

Gary R. Wheeler wrote:

I'm of the opinion that if you "dread" working in a programming language, then that's a sign that you don't understand it.

I'm very well versed in VB.NET, yet when I got an offer to take over a VB.NET WinForms program I sighed, thought of the customer it would gain me, bit my lip and said I'd do it. As I suspected, there are plenty of forms that I dread working on. Not because I don't know the language, but because the original programmer didn't and now I have to make brain farts to get a gist of what he was thinking while a wrote that crap. So basically your average VB(.NET) project :) I have the same with JavaScript because you have to read ALL the code to make reasonable assumptions about it, like what kind of value a function returns. And if the original programmer was a jackass, a function may even return another type depending on the input. I guess that's what you get for not being type-safe. Maybe I don't dread the language, but I dread how easy it is to write crap code in some languages that I have to deal with because others are bad at their job.

Best, Sander sanderrossel.com Migrating Applications to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript Object-Oriented Programming in C# Succinctly

[fd9750]

Interesting reading but I would like to propose that Forth or its derivative "White lightning" should be included in the list. In the mean time it has become so obscure that most people don't remember it ever existed. If I ever see a piece of code I wrote in the derivative I am 100% sure I would not even remember how it was supposed to work.

[CPallini]

Uh!? No one fears the common business-oriented language? :-D

[kalberts]

You mean, fear of wearing down your fingers to short stubs?

[W Balboos GHB]

Selections seem to be from a bimodal distribution of respondents: Selections disdained because they take brains Selections disdained because they're :elephant:ing dumb and annoying Or, put another way, perhaps the two groups are those who code and happen to get paid for it and those who code only because they get paid for it.

Ravings en masse^

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein

"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010

[Peter R Fletcher]

After spending a little time investigating Lisp, many years ago, I concluded that a better name for it might be "Stutter", given the names of the many list manipulation operators. :)

[obermd]

TECO - built for string manipulations and was used for the first version of Emacs. Definitely a write-only language as there was an annual competition to see who could figure out what a specific TECO line would do to an arbitrary string.

[Mark Miller]

Years ago I wrote a front-end program in dBASEIII that generated AutoLisp scripts to manipulate AutoCad drawings. The engineers would provide a few dozen input parameters, the AutoLisp script was built, then AutoCad was fired up and produce the drawing for them. I remember spending lots of time counting parenthesis and certainly agree with another comment - LISP = Lost In Stupid Parenthesis. The end result worked really well, and I learned how to count really well.

Sincerely, -Mark mamiller@rhsnet.org

[sasadler]

I started assembly language programming in the late 70's but in the last 20 years in my career as an Embedded Systems Engineer (now retired), I saw no need to use assembly language in any of the products I worked on. C/C++ compiler tech for anything from an 8051 to a TI DSP generate excellent code that's relatively hard to improve upon.

[Mike Hankey]

Very true, I seldom use assembler, mostly c++.

I'm not sure how many cookies it makes to be happy, but so far it's not 27. JaxCoder.com

[OldDBA]

I still use TECO occasionally. Learned it in 1972. I sometimes wrote TECO macros to do a task and while I was waiting for it to finish, I could write a Cobol or Assembler program to do the same thing, compile it and run it while still waiting for TECO to finish. It was really easy to use for scripting when the amount of data was small.

[Deepak Vasudevan]

(V)isual (B)asic (affectionately called as Very Bad) should be having a distinguished position in the list though.

[Stuart Dootson]

[DXL](https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSYQBZ\_9.6.1/com.ibm.doors.configuring.doc/topics/c\_dxl.html) is the worst one I've used... It's a pretty basic C-like language - the horrors come from the interface to the DOORS requirements management system, and how easy it is to leak memory without even trying. Here's [an example](http://www.smartdxl.com/content/?p=481) - DXL can allocate, but not *deallocate* strings, so every string you use takes up memory, until the process (which might be on the server side of DOORS) is terminated. I encountered DOORS and DXL when developing an API for accessing DOORS from Java, using (in-effect) hand-rolled RPC to call from Java into DXL (using a DLL written in C++ as an intermediary) and then returning results from DXL in JSON, which was deserialised into Java objects using [Jackson](https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson). Of this, two parts *didn't* suck - C++ and Jackson. But... it worked. And worked reliably.

Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p