There are several objective measures for programming language "awfulness". The ones I've seen published the most in papers are:

- Time to identify bugs in code

- Defects in written software in fixed exercises

- Defects in written software in real code

- Time to develop a certain program

I can't say that the measurements of these is easy - but when we measure these with old vs. new languages we see change.

One can claim something can't be "objectively good or bad" in the Popper sense of science only caring about falsifiability or in the Quine sense of "just predicting" but that becomes a philosophical argument and debate.

In my opinion since languages are how we express ourselves and we write code in a _very_ roundabout way in many cases - languages are in fact objectively awful, the number of defects is huge, development time is long and developer experience is something few people deal with.

The literature on developer experience and programming language API is just starting to emerge and we are still very very early on.

And of course all the research on this is pretty bad, on grad students / biased samples and the methodology isn't great but it's better than nothing and we should strive to improve it.

If anything that just shows how bad things are. (Although I believe they really are improving)

> One can claim something can't be "objectively good or bad" in the Popper sense of science only caring about falsifiability or in the Quine sense of "just predicting" but that becomes a philosophical argument and debate.

Yes, one can claim such a thing. However you don't have to debate it you have the foresight to not make claims about the subjective qualities of the objective world.

Your comment inspired an interesting thread about how nothing can be objectively good or bad. ..until it seems the only thing that is or can be objectively bad is the GP's use of language.

Well, ok, maybe his language wasn't objectively awful, but just philosophically confused, not efficient or sensible use of words for his intended purpose. If you elaborate on that sentence, you will both be able to agree on what was actually meant, coming at it from each side.

I don't think language can be objectively bad. It can be more or less effective in communicating an idea.

I just wanted to help him see the world in a way that is more similar to the way I see it. I think the way I see the world is a good way to see it.

I spreed my perspective like a virus.

Even in taste, some things are objectively awful -- eating shit for example.

Whether some bizarro outlier likes it doesn't matter, the statistically significant majority doesn't. So, it's not that shit is subjectively good or bad taste it's that said persons are objectively weirdos.

In other fields things are subjective, but people who know better have a canon, which is a more objective ranking. E.g. how Vanilla Ice is worse than Bach in substantial ways, even though some (even many) might prefer the former.

Programming languages are also part of computer science, which has some downright objective criteria too.

Counter-example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_lang...

Thank you! That page links to a funny Bjarne Stroustrup (April Fools) paper I hadn't seen on overloading whitespace, Generalizing Overloading for C++2000.

http://www.stroustrup.com/whitespace98.pdf