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Is it just my feeling or are there languages which are preferred on HN? Indicators for languages which are liked by the HN community: - Positive stories get m

• AhtiK 10y ago
  Node.js is a JavaScript runtime, not a language. Used for server-side JavaScript and web frontend build pipeline. Replacing Node.js with JavaScript doesn't help either as the frontend vs server-side vs npm ecosystem vs es2015 becomes a loaded question .)
• funkyy 10y ago
  But you writing this as a bad thing? It's normal for a community to pick tools/solutions that are preferable. A lot of HN users are for example startup owners/creators so it's normal that they will prefer easy and semi-automated language like Python.
  • pawadu 10y ago
    It would be interesting to hear from people maintaining code that came from these startups. I suspect they would have a very very different view of things :) Maybe something investors should think about? Ehh, who am I kidding...
    • funkyy 10y ago
      This simple code and more time on hands to spend on promoting = successful startup. No one really cares about scaling YT-like app when it has 10 users. Developers will handle that. And if they want jobs, startups must be made. As you might know, successful startups are made by less technical people mostly...
• lmm 10y ago
  HN has language preferences, sure. Of course it does - people have language preferences, and some languages really are better than others - no wonder our aggregate likes some languages more than others. I don't agree with every specific of your star-rating, and a more objective measure would probably be more useful (I'm sure I've seen charts of which topics are popular or not on HN), but of course HN has preferences. Why wouldn't it?
• dismantlethesun 10y ago
  At a glance, it looks like all languages are reasonably well loved except PHP and Node.js (shouldn't this just be Javascript? Does having a different standard lib make it a different language?) I think that's due to people having flash backs to terribly written code in both languages. For example, PHP apps pre-2005 rarely if ever used frontend controllers, preferring instead to twine in configuration and helper functions into isolated pages that were directly served by Apache. This meant that there was no single obvious place to put things like caching. Additionally, once upon a time, PHP didn't really have well developed ORMS, so everyone just wrote queries and hopefully parameterised queries---but not always. So if you had a hobby project that took off, then within 3 years it'd be a roiling ball of mud where it's difficult to do basic things like tracing which calls happen per page. PHP came to prominence early in the web, and it was easy to use so everyone had a hobby project that took off, or had to work within something like that. Hence the hate. To compare it to Javascript, I think the disdain for both languages is due to their initial nature---they were both written over an short period of time, and evolved in spurts rather than being carefully designed from day one or designed to overcome the shortcomings of another language. The quality of the above really shows up in the inconsistency of the standard libraries, and the fact that certain semantics were inconsistent or danger zones in practice but couldn't be changed. --- I do remember though when everyone hated C, and loved C++, then went back to loving C... so maybe programmers are just fickle and none of what I said makes sense. :)
  • kayoone 10y ago
    just to chime in on this, modern PHP is nothing like what people remember from the pre ROR days, i still use it to this day and the major frameworks and libs are really well written to the point i feel some are even over engineered and almost looking like Java (just take a look at the latest Guzzle PHP Library)
    • collyw 10y ago
      As my PHP fluent colleague said to me - don't bother learning PHP or you will end up having to fix (our) Wordpress sites and thats a nightmare. We have a Python application, and while its not written well, the PHP sites we have seem to be a fair bit worse even the ones not done in Wordpress.
• z3t4 10y ago
  What I find interesting is that we are so quick to follow new trends.
  • frogfuzion 10y ago
    Isn't there a psychological aspect to this - that if you are on the cutting edge of languages/frameworks, that you believe you will have an edge over everyone else and a chance to be better for a period of time at least? This is of course typically ignores whether the cutting edge can actually solve problems better than mature languages/frameworks.
    • z3t4 10y ago
      Psychology is a very broad area. We all want to be part of something, a community or culture, especially one witch is highly regarded among our peers.
    • JustSomeNobody 10y ago
      Psychology or survival? How much demand is there for someone who's maintained an MFC app for the past 20 years? This person could ROCK at C++, but who's going to look at his resume and give him an interview?
  • JustSomeNobody 10y ago
    While I generally agree with you, I'm not sure Python is a new trend.
    • mark-r 10y ago
      I had an opportunity to learn Python around 1996, and I passed. When I came across it again in 2003 I tried it, then kicked myself for not jumping on the bandwagon earlier.
  • blakeyrat 10y ago
    1) Speak for yourself 2) Python's from 1995
• rando444 10y ago
  One obvious problem looking at your list is that PHP is ranked so low. This is likely due to the fact that most discussions on this site are not about PHP, but PHP frameworks like Laravel, Symfony, Zend, etc.
  • d33 10y ago
    Not all - note the always relevant: https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
    • rando444 10y ago
      Nobody said all.. and your link is just some guy's rant. He mentions at the end that he doesn't have any conclusions and he just assumes that people who read the article agree with him. Sure, PHP has it's faults, but as your article points out, it's designed to give people who aren't full time programmers tools with which to build websites or scripts to perform tasks, and there is a large market for that sort of thing.
      • bottled_poe 10y ago
        > it's designed to give people who aren't full time programmers tools with which to build websites And just like that, the cyber-security profession was born.
    • jrcii 10y ago
      That's not necessarily relevant. It's been rebutted point by point http://forums.devshed.com/php-development-5/php-fractal-bad-design-hardly-929746.html http://forums.devshed.com/php-development-5/php-fractal-bad-..., and PHP has undergone major changes since that was written.
      • Hasu 10y ago
        That PHP has gone through major changes matters, and I agree that newer versions of PHP are huge improvements, but I don't think that response is an adequate rebuttal of the Fractal of Bad Design article. The "rebuttal" is closer to apologetics, and it starts out by basically denying the idea that language design matters. Admittedly, the author of that post lost me pretty early on when he said that languages don't need to be predictable, it's on developers to learn everything about how and why a language implemented things they way they're implemented, and complaining just means you're lazy. Sorry, but when I can guess at syntax in Python or Ruby and be right(because the languages were designed to be predictable and consistent), I don't want to consult arcane documentation in PHP to figure out why things don't work the way I expect them to work. The author is also pretty rude and flippant, often when he's not even right. He ignores things like the Fractal author explicitly saying that Wikipedia and Facebook have very smart developers, so he can say that the PHP "community of amateurs" comment was about those developers. Pretty disingenous. He repeatedly complains that the author "doesn't understand" "loosely typed" languages, but never considers that maybe the author understands them but thinks they're bad design, hence the whole "fractal of bad design" in the name of the post?
• passiveincomelg 10y ago
  Interesting that you rate RoR lower than Java and .NET. My perception is that there is a lot of bashing of the latter two. Personally I do like Python, Rust and Go and I'm curious about Swift. So there's one "data" point. :)
  • blakeyrat 10y ago
    Any bashing of C# is always because "Micro$loth" was involved with it, very rarely is it criticized on its actual features or tools. (And when it is, the criticism is usually something like, "it's too much like Java", which I don't personally see as very damning.)
• rplnt 10y ago
  Javscript (I assume you mean) just one star? Then why 90% of the projects on the frontpage are js-based?
• flexie 10y ago
  I would say that node.js is very liked on HN. Half the stories here are about Node.js. But I rarely see any positive mentioning on HN about c#, .NET, C++ or Java.
  • douche 10y ago
    Those are the unsexy, but get-shit-done languages. I would hazard a guess that most people are familiar with them, and either are currently, or have in the past, used them for their day jobs. But they are on the plateau of productivity, rather than the peak of inflated expectations or trough of disillusionment, to use the Gartner model.
    • collyw 10y ago
      MS languages are used a lot more in large corporate style environments, while HN is startup focused where people are using open source more.
  • gjm11 10y ago
    > Half the stories here are about Node.js. I think that might be a slight exaggeration. At present, zero of the stories on the HN front page appear to be about Node.js.
    • JustSomeNobody 10y ago
      My last ten coin flips were heads, but overall, heads is roughly half.
      • gjm11 10y ago
        The HN front page is 30 items. Of those, none were about Node.js when I made that comment. Right now, none are about Node.js and, though I don't trust my memory much, it's a largely different selection of items. If half of all HN front page items were about Node.js on average, the probability of getting (let's say, conservatively) 40 with none about Node.js would be (1/2)^40 or about 10^-12. Of course people exaggerate and I am fallible. If 30% of all HN front page items are about Node.js on average, the probability of getting at most one such item out of 40 is about 10^-5. Which is, y'know, still much less likely than ten consecutive heads when flipping a coin.
• 2T1Qka0rEiPr 10y ago
  Maybe all your C#/.NET/Java devs can't access HN because their big enterprise businesses have security policies which have blacklisted it? Hah.
  • finnjohnsen2 10y ago
    .NET/Java is to pay the bills, and we vote for the fun stuff while we create our boiler plate classes.
    • jcadam 10y ago
      Exactly. My fun language at the moment is Clojure... I think several years of Java development has made me seriously hate OOP.
• neverminder 10y ago
  Rust should then get 6 stars judging from unparalleled excitement every news about it brings here. Rightfully so in my opinion. By the way, it's "Clojure", not "Closure" and what happened to Scala?
  • agentgt 10y ago
    I have actually wondered that myself (Scala). I was so excited about Scala years ago (2006). One of my TAs from college was working on the language as well. It finally looked like an OCaml for the masses. Over time my excitement changed. I assume others may share my thoughts hence the less excitement: * It is on the JVM and there are lots of languages on the JVM competing with Java. * While the fusion OOP + FP fusion is interesting I have grown wary of kitchen sink languages. There are so many ways people write Scala. Scala from one project looks vastly different. * The endless DSLs * Java 8 is often good enough. Particularly for interop and community support. * Every time I have to add Scala to a Java project I'm thinking here comes 9MB jar that some classpath scanning thing is going to take its sweet time on (Spring, Servlet 3.0, etc). But I think most of the reason is Rust has filled that hard core typers niche with the added novelty of unique memory management and competing with other LLVM languages instead of JVM languages. Scala has become "old" like Java and OCaml :) .
    • premium-concern 10y ago
      I kind of wonder how these points are true today vs. 10 years ago ... * It also compiles to Scala.js (it's actually the independent best compile-to-JS language out there in terms of libraries, tooling and IDE support). Support for compiling directly to native is coming around nicely. * Scala is quite far away from the kitchen sink, and many of the questionable parts have been deprecated and/or removed. * I have never seen much DSLs while writing Scala. Sure, it's probably quite nice, but I have rarely seen endless DSLs in practice. * The jar is around 4MB (2.12) and when writing idiomatic Scala (~ not Spring/Servlet) there shouldn't be any kind of reflection or classpath scanning happening.
      • agentgt 10y ago
• brightball 10y ago
  Elixir is exciting because it's making the amazing world of Erlang accessible to mere mortals with a developer experience on par with Ruby.
• sotojuan 10y ago
  And in /r/programming, anything that isn't Python, C, C++, C#, Java, Rust, and sometimes Haskell gets hated on and labeled as "hipster" and terrible.
• tim333 10y ago
  There have been surveys if a bit out of date: Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language? (2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3746692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3746692 Poll: What's Your Most Disliked Programming Language? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3748961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3748961 https://i.imgur.com/toGKy21.jpg https://i.imgur.com/toGKy21.jpg
  • nhumrich 10y ago
    Someone should start another "what's your favorite language" poll. A lot of currently popular languages weren't even on the 2012 poll at all, (like golang)
    • rezashirazian 10y ago
      Swift wasn't even released back then
• mickmock 10y ago
  This is so true. I often think that people only need to put the word 'Rust' into the title to get a ton of up votes. Maybe because rust is a great game as well as being a popular programming language ;)
• amelius 10y ago
  You forgot one: Lisp *****
• na85 10y ago
  Node.js isn't a language.
• galfarragem 10y ago
  Ordering languages and frameworks by amount of 'love' (edited with small adjustments): ***** Python, Rust, Lisp ****' Go, Swift, C, PostgreSQL **** Elm, Elixir, Typescript, Haskell, OCaml, JS-ES6, Kotlin, Crystal ***' Scala, Lua, Clojure, Erlang *** C#/.NET, Java, C++, Ruby, JS-ES5, MySQL ** Node JS, RoR, Meteor, MongoDB * PHP, VBasic, Cobol, Coffeescript
  • rz2k 10y ago
    I might rank the love for Elixir higher. Go has a lot of detractors, in addition to the people who are getting a lot done with it. Comments often seem to think Haskell or its community is a little ridiculous. Lua always gets positive comments, maybe a 3.5. If we're including MySQL and PostgreSQL, SQLite should be way up there based on the universally positive comments. MongoDB might be ranked too high at 2, though people have begun to acknowledge that was because they tried to use it for the wrong task.
  • coredog64 10y ago
    If PG gets 4 stars, I'd put MySQL at 2 or 3 based on all the comments that show up in MySQL stories: "Why didn't they use feature X in PG?" "MySQL kicked my dog and cheated with my significant other", etc.
  • dccoolgai 10y ago
    Add: * * * * * WASM Dare to question the pragmatics of diverging web dev practices into a whole new realm of complexity and drown in downvotes - and a litany of people being downright personally insulting/condescending. This is sort of a corollary to JS being * (I think you ranked ES6 too high) and I've been inured to people hating/ranting against JS to a point - but even I was shocked by the personal rancor that oozes out if you try to have an objective discussion about whether the web really needs one more language.
    • galfarragem 10y ago
      I agree, it would be more reasonable to rank JS-ES6 and Kotlin with 3.5* instead of 4. And Go with 4* instead of 4.5*.
• jgord 10y ago
  Surely measurable ? perhaps github stats are indicative - http://githut.info/ http://githut.info/ Anecdotally I would have expected Javascript to be near the top of hours being used.
• Shorel 10y ago
  No D in your list? / goes to a corner to cry...
• FabHK 10y ago
  Julia ***** (or maybe that's just my opinion :-)
• xiaoma 10y ago
  That's close to my perception. If you gave one of Python's stars to Ruby and RoR, gave two of Go's to Elixir and created an entry for Lisp with six stars, it would be pretty much exactly what I'd estimated from this site.