Worst programming languages: the most disliked

There is a lot of information on the most popular programming languages. To obtain a comprehensive list, it is enough to analyze the CVs of hundreds of thousands of programmers around the world to have a fairly precise idea of ​​the most used and liked programming languages.

However, we rarely have the information of those languages ​​with which coders prefer not to work. This information is rarely requested in CVs, but some of that statistics are contained on the Stack Overflow Jobs site and allows us to reach some interesting conclusions.

Most Disliked Programming Languages

By a fairly large margin, the most hated programming languages ​​are:

Perl

Designed in 1987 by Larry Wall, it takes characteristics of the C language in terms of its block style, which is also similar to AWK.

Delphi

It is a software development environment designed for programming with an emphasis on the visual. It uses as language a modern version of Pascal, named Object Pascal.

VBA

Visual Basic for Applications is a macro language of Microsoft Visual Basic. It is used to program applications that run on Windows.

These disliked programming languages are followed by, in order of displeasure:

PHP

General use language, designed for the dynamic content web development.

Objective-C

It is an object-oriented language as a superset of C, created by Brad Cox in 1980.

Coffeescript

It compiles to JavaScript, but its syntax takes elements from Ruby, Python and Haskell for brevity and readability in JavaScript.

Ruby

Ruby is a reflective, interpreted and object-oriented programming language. It was created by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto and introduced in 1995.

Programming languages ​​and popularity

Taking into account only the data provided by coders from developed countries such as the US, UK, Germany and Canada, the languages ​​that are trending are the ones that people like must. Those languages ​​that have more than 3% dislike among programmers coincide with those that are falling into disuse.

The only exception to this rule is VBA, which maintains a stable growth rate and even grows slightly. Popular languages ​​like R, Rust, Typescript and Kotlin are also the fastest growing ones.

Other elements that programmers hate

Since we are talking about programming languages ​​that displease coders, why not mention other hated elements such as operating systems, platforms, libraries or old programming languages?

Among the most hated are Internet Explorer and Visual Basic. If we talk about operating system, Microsoft takes the coder´s walk of shame. Programmers also don’t like COBOL, Fortran and Pascal, grandparents of the computer programming but replaced by friendlier languages in terms of implementation and syntax.

On the other hand, technologies like Git, R, Python-3.X, CSS3, HTML5 or jQuery seem to be well received by coders, because they hardly have negative reviews. However, programmers are likely only restricting their opinions on the subject to increase their job opportunities.

To conclude, we must take into account that these criteria are not those of the general public, but those of the group of coders who have wanted to publicly express their opinion in Stack Overflow Jobs. So we are not trying to start a “programming language war” here, but only stating the facts from a given data.