The five things I hate about you
What do you hate most about your language? That’s the simple but interesting question Brian asks in a recent post:
Try this question the next time someone tries to push a different programming language on you, or even when you want to hire someone: “What five things do you hate most about language X?”
If they can’t find five things to hate, they don’t know the language well enough to either advocate it or pull in the big dollars using it.
First Titus listed his five, and now Jacob has his list up as well. Both are well worth reading.
Can you name five things you hate about your favorite/pet language?
March 8th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
1) “I before E, except after C.” I hate that. Neighbors? Whey? C’mon now.
2) Its/it’s. Where’s the consistency?
3) Eleven, twelve. What’s so special? Why do they get to break the rules?
4) Past perfect. Hardly!
5) Heteronyms. ’nuff said.
March 8th, 2007 at 10:14 pm
LOL! Heh, nice.
March 9th, 2007 at 6:16 am
You capitalized brian d foy’s name! Heretic!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_d_foy
March 9th, 2007 at 6:45 am
Quoth Wikipedia:
And I prefer that my name be rendered in all uppercase with four exclamation points after it. And when spoken, the “TOTALLY AWESOME” is silent.
…and yet no seems to do that. :)
March 10th, 2007 at 9:26 am
Oh I think it’s asinine…don’t get me wrong.
March 10th, 2007 at 9:31 am
Ok, so I have been giving this some thought…the 5 things I hate about Ruby.
1. Deeply nested `end`s look like crap
2. It’s slower than old people doing it
3. Way less googlabilty compared to Perl/Python
4. Can’t make up it’s mind about Perlisms ($_ works, but @var_name is for class attributes)
5. The pipe syntax for iterators is confusing to new users
I could go on. There are always lots of things that annoy me, but currently Ruby annoys me least.
March 10th, 2007 at 10:38 am
Hrm… that’s a good list for Ruby.
The one about “way less Googlability” is interesting in particular. I assume you mean it’s harder to find stuff on the web about it? Do you think think that’s due to there being less information on the web, or that it’s just a quirk of the language that getting good search terms is more difficult?