All about Mobile, Web, Technology, Politics, Security, E-Commerce and Living in the Philippines.

Saturday, November 22, 2008

The most cursed programming language

Shit!

That’s the word you’ll probably hear snapping out from my corner every time I encounter a  stupid design flaw on a project I’m reviewing or when my machine crashes – a I dispense them generously too. However, did you know that the leading cause of developers swearing is due to the idiocy of the programming language itself.

Here is the top 10 according to GitHub stats as of this post:

Github-curse-search

 

  • 10th place goes to Python with 29 projects where developers immortalized their frustration in Python code. Chris Hagner gave a talk why Python sucks during the PyCon 2008 held last March 14, 2008 in Chicago. The biggest downfall Chris spoke of in using Python was speed -- but hey Google use it so it can’t be that bad!
  • The 9th place goes to HTML with 41 projects  where developers immortalized their frustration in HTML tags. I was actually surprised at that less developers curse HTML, for me writing HTML tags is already HELL! Well maybe, because there are less people who manually write HTML tags these days so that would account for the low rank.
  • The 8th place goes to PHP with 52 projects where in developers immortalized their frustration in PHP both in CamelCase and Hungarian notation.
  • The lucky 7th place goes to JavaScript with 61 Github projects where in developers immortalized their frustration in DOM and they need to write in different versions too, one for each browser.
  • The 6th place (tie) goes to Java with 76 projects where in developers immortalized their frustration on explaining to users why they have to include the huge Java SDK on every installation even if Java in a multi-platform language.
  • The 5th place (tie) goes to C++ with 76 projects where in developers immortalized their frustration why code reuse can actually creates more bloat.
  • The 4th place goes to Perl with 81 projects where in developers immortalized their frustration why Perl Regular Expressions forces the use slashes and single characters rather a human readable one.
  • The 3rd place goes to Text only with 89 projects. Why where else it can we freely communicate out feelings of frustration than on the documentation!
  • The 2nd place goes to C with 290 projects, it can’t be help since the Linux kernel swear words contributed much to this.

    linux swear graph

Finally, the most cursed programming language according to GitHub is Ruby with 336 projects! It’s not really surprising once you read this entry from Wikipedia; Ruby was conceived on February 24, 1993 by Yukihiro Matsumoto who wished to create a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming. According to Matsumoto he "wanted a scripting language that was more powerful than Perl, and more object-oriented than Python. That's why I decided to design my own language” – inadvertently he also inherited twice the headache because of this combination.

0 comments:

Related Links