Vasudev Ram pointed readers to a Hacker News poll on the subject. While the raw numbers per language are interesting, I think the percentages of Like and Dislike vs. the total votes cast for a given language are perhaps a better metric.
Thus the five most liked languages based on raw votes were:
- Python
- C
- JavaScript
- Ruby
- SQL
And the five most disliked languages were:
- PHP
- Java
- C++
- JavaScript
- Visual Basic
It’s rather interesting that JavaScript is on both lists (and I’m quite surprised that SQL had so many votes). I haven’t included the actual numbers since the poll is still active.
Ranking the languages by number of Like votes as percentage of total votes for that language gives a perhaps more realistic picture:
| C | 88% |
| Python | 86% |
| Scheme | 84% |
| Lua | 84% |
| Lisp * | 81% |
| Haskell | 80% |
| Rust | 79% |
| Clojure | 78% |
| Erlang | 76% |
| Go | 75% |
(*) Dimitri Fontaine will appreciate this.
I believe those rankings will be more stable than the raw votes. Oh, and SQL ranks about 14 according to these percentages.
For completeness, here are the five most disliked languages based on ratio of Dislike votes to total votes for the language:
| Cobol | 94% |
| ColdFusion | 94% |
| Visual Basic | 89% |
| Actionscript | 83% |
| PHP | 76% |
As they say, YMMV.
Filed under: PostgreSQL, Python
