Statistics of the most 'hated' programming languages

Do you know which programming language is hated? Join TipsMake.com to refer to the statistics of the most "hated" programming languages ​​in the article below!

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On  Stack Overflow Jobs (stackoverflow.com), you can create Developer Story for yourself to introduce achievements and progress in your career. Moreover, in which you have the option to add the tags in the item you want to do and don't want to do.

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Thanks to that, we have the opportunity to consult with hundreds of thousands of other developers around the world. There are many ways to measure the popularity of programming languages, for example we often use hits or questions on Stack Overflow to know those trends. However, this dataset is a rare opportunity to know which technologies and programming languages ​​are hated based on their CV.

Programming language

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To understand the difference of the tags, we consider the frequency of frequent occurrences in the Dislike tag (Disliked) compared to the frequency that appears in the Likes (Liked) tag. If a tag reaches 50%, it means it has the same amount of likes and dislikes. If it reaches 99%, it means one person doesn't like it every 99 people. (We use the Bayes empirical method described in the post to estimate the average level with about 95% confidence).

Let's start by looking at the list of selected programming languages ​​(different from platforms like Android or libraries like JQuery), all of which are mentioned at least 2,000 times in the programmer's CV.

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The most hated programming languages ​​are Perl, Delphi and VBA. Followed by PHP, Objective-C, Coffeescript and Ruby. Meanwhile R is the most popular programming language.

If you follow the technology rankings, you will realize that fast-growing programming languages ​​are loved by programmers. R, Python, Typescript, Go and Rust are all very popular on Stack Overflow. Similarly, Perl, Objective-C and Ruby are the most hated languages ​​and become more and more "smoked".

We can see this better by comparing the level of coverage as well as the rate of development of each language with% of people who do not like it, in which orange represents the hated programming language. To ensure consistency, we limit statistics in developed countries like US, UK, Germany and Canada.

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Usually they have a relationship between the development of the tag and whether it is often hated or not. Nearly all hated programming languages ​​have very low Stack Overflow traffic while R, Rust, Typescript and Kotlin are the opposite, they have very high access speeds. The least hated tags - R, Rust, Typescript and Kotlin - all of which are fast-growing (Typescript and Kotlin grow very fast so they are less hated).

Clojure is a rather special case when it is not well known and also in languages ​​that have reduced traffic but are not hated. Similarly MATLAB is the same, although not famous, but it is not hated by programmers. Thereby, we see the limitation in not being able to analyze emotionally.

While web developers have comments on PHP, C # or Ruby, those who do not work in data analysis have little reason to comment on MATLAB. (This is probably part of the reason R programming language is rarely mentioned in the "Dislikes" list.) That's because if they don't work with programming languages ​​like MATLAB, they don't care about it.

There are also many other influencing factors that we do not know, such as the selection of a crowd or a programming language but never reusing it but moving to another language. Another possibility is that people feel comfortable when expressing what they don't like if they feel that the programming language is no longer popular. It is also possible that developers often use this field to evaluate the technology they have used to work but now no longer use it. This leads to the natural progression of 'alternative' technologies in the Dislike section.

What are the most hated and loved technology tags?

In the previous section we talk about programming languages ​​that are not operating systems, platform platforms or libraries. So what is the most hated technology? To ensure accuracy, we will limit the technologies mentioned at least 1,000 times:

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There are several candidates from Microsoft technology, especially Internet Explorer and Visual Basic, as well as 'Microsoft' tag ("Apple" that is also included in this list, although the number of candidates does not like negligible). Flash also participated in the 'most hated' banquet. Long-standing languages ​​like COBOL, Fortran and Pascal have also appeared.

Note that it does not imply that these technologies are too bad, but only the programmers' negative attitude towards them (at least in a group of developers who share their feelings publicly they).

We can also mention the most popular technologies, things that are almost never hated. (This time, because the tags are highly popular, we only focus on technologies that are mentioned at least 10,000 times.)

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Git can make many developers feel frustrated (certainly I have) but very few dare to write that on their CV because this is the most preferred tag in Developer Stories. The R programming language also appears and it's not the only controversial tag. Machine learning is extremely loved by the IT community. Python-3.X, CSS3 and HTML5 tell us that developers rarely remember or specifically say which version they don't like in that technology. And as usual, jQuery is still very popular on Stackoverflow.

See also: 9 reasons you should be equipped with a little knowledge of HTML and CSS

Network between tags

We combine all the tags into a network to represent the software technology ecosystem. Thereby, you will see more clearly the parts that are hated and controversial.

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You can see clearly the contrast between the tags in Microsoft (centered around C # and .NET), PHP (along with WordPress and Drupal) and mobile development programming (especially Objective-C) as well. as in the tag about the operating system with Windows and OSX.

See also: The reason why C programming language is never outdated

Competitor

If someone likes a specific tag, is there any card they don't normally like? We can measure this by using a non-coefficient between the appearance of a particular tag that is liked. (When calculating these correlations, we only see people who don't like at least one tag).

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The picture shows the rivalry between: Linux and OSX vs Windows; Git vs SVN, vim vs emacs and R vs SAS. These technologies are not exactly rivals but they are two approaches to a different goal. Besides, they also show the development from old technology to new technology. (SVN is replaced with Git, XML is replaced with JSON, VB replaced with C #). This makes sense about what people will list in the profile; usually developers specify that they don't want to work with something they consider obsolete.

Epilogue

I have no interest in 'programming language war' and there are no judgments about users who share the technology they don't want. It is important that we have an open view and are willing to learn new things, anyway, what we do will make people, not what we hate.

If you are interested in sharing the technologies you like and dislike and looking for the next step in your career, you can create your own Developer Story.

Author: David Robinson

Refer to some more articles:

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Having fun!