Re: Language ranking

[Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>]

Simon Clubley <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> writes:

> On 2014-04-02, Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org> wrote:
>> http://hammerprinciple.com/therighttool/statements/i-often-get-angry-when-writing-code-in-this-langua
>
> I couldn't help but notice that Ada is considered more annoying than C and
> C is considered more annoying than Pascal. :-)

It's not clear what that survey is measuring, but it's not measuring
which languages are considered more annoying.

Consider that I can name a number of annoying things about Ada,
but I can't name a single annoying thing about Agda, which is
the next item on their list.  Is that because Ada is more annoying
than Agda, or because I "consider" it more annoying?"  No, it's
because I don't know anything about Agda!  ;-)

I don't see any data indicating to what extent the people being surveyed
know what they're talking about (though I admit I didn't look very
hard).

I know 32 of those 50 languages well enough to be able to name
something seriously annoying, which leads me to believe that Agda
and the others are annoying, too.

> I wonder what they mean by "Assembler" ? That can cover a wide range of
> architectures from the PIC18 (seriously lousy IMHO) to the elegant ones
> such as ARM.

True.  But pretty much all assembly languages have a lot in common.

> On a more serious note, it would be much more meaningful to have grouped
> those languages by typical problem domains because comparing COBOL to
> Javascript to Assembler doesn't really tell you anything.

Perhaps, but we are in the infancy of programming language design,
and all of those languages have serious flaws that are independent
of application area.  Which application area doesn't benefit
from readability?  Which application area benefits from an
error-prone language?

- Bob