Re:What are some of the most disliked programming languages?
by mikekchar on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @06:13AM
(#15599934)
I use Ruby everyday and while I definitely don't hate it, there are many things I dislike. For example, functions are not first class citizens (despite the "functional" slant to the standard library). You have to jump through hoops to do any real functional programming (and it's ugly).
The syntax has waaaay too many options. This leads to a language where 3rd party tools are really hard to write. Even at this late date, refactoring tools are mostly absent (or awful). Not only that, but it leads to serious religious wars about how to format your code (I'm sick to death of it, even though I try to stay out of it).
Modules are slightly strange. You can't really use them for namespacing without writing pretty non-standard code. They are really only useful for mixins -- which normally isn't a great plan.
And as popular as meta programming is, it's incredibly awkward. The underlying design seems completely arbitrary and is hard to reason about. Despite the many syntactic options for frivolous things, there are very few syntactic tools for meta programming -- just super long function names.
People are going to laugh, but I actually prefer Javascript to Ruby because the design is much more logical and flexible (despite the poor syntax and really terrible standard library). There are lots more things that bug me about Ruby, but I think those are the main ones. I still enjoy writing code in it, but it wouldn't be my first choice these days.
The syntax has waaaay too many options. This leads to a language where 3rd party tools are really hard to write. Even at this late date, refactoring tools are mostly absent (or awful). Not only that, but it leads to serious religious wars about how to format your code (I'm sick to death of it, even though I try to stay out of it).
Modules are slightly strange. You can't really use them for namespacing without writing pretty non-standard code. They are really only useful for mixins -- which normally isn't a great plan.
And as popular as meta programming is, it's incredibly awkward. The underlying design seems completely arbitrary and is hard to reason about. Despite the many syntactic options for frivolous things, there are very few syntactic tools for meta programming -- just super long function names.
People are going to laugh, but I actually prefer Javascript to Ruby because the design is much more logical and flexible (despite the poor syntax and really terrible standard library). There are lots more things that bug me about Ruby, but I think those are the main ones. I still enjoy writing code in it, but it wouldn't be my first choice these days.