What are the Most Disliked Programming Languages? – Stack Overflow Blog

Should I be worried? The three most-disliked programming languages in Stack Overflow’s latest blog post are Perl, Delphi, and VBA. And those three languages all have a special place in my heart. Oops…

Perl I have been enjoying recently and VBA is most of my day-to-day coding (since what they actually pay me for is driving MS Office). Delphi remains the only piece of software I have ever bought based on one marketing presentation. After QBASIC, I moved up to Turbo Pascal 6. When Delphi came out, I only had to see it on screen to be hooked.

Delphi is also what taught me that the magic in a toolchain is really the linker. As I was learning C, I was able to write Windows programs using my DOS version of Turbo C++, linked with the Delphi linker.

Excerpts from Stack Overflow’s analysis follow.

As a measure of how polarizing each tag is, we’ll look at what fraction of the time it appears in someone’s Disliked tags compared to how often it appears in either someone’s Liked or Disliked tags. Thus, 50% would mean a tag was disliked exactly as often as it was liked, while 1% means there were 99 people who liked it for each one who disliked it. (We used the empirical Bayes method I describe in this post to estimate these averages, and this method to calculate 95% credible intervals).

Let’s start by looking at a selected list of programming languages (as opposed to platforms like Android or libraries like JQuery), all of which have at least 2,000 mentions on Developer Stories.