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2021 survey data reveals the most hated and loved programming languages

Catwell

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Stack Overflow’s 2021 developer survey reveals that coders hate the COBOL programming language the most. (Image Credit: Pakata Goh/Unsplash)

 

I can’t say I dislike any one programming language. Matlab was annoying in school, I suppose. C#, maybe. But, my most loved? x86 assembly for sure.

 

The latest developer survey results are in! Stack Overflow recently revealed that developers have a strong distaste for specific programming languages and COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) is the most hated one. Over 80,000 developers in 181 countries participated in the survey, providing the firm with a better glimpse into which language they hate and love the most. Stack Overflow’s survey questions involved asking them which programming languages they used in the past year, which ones they want to work with next year, and which ones they don’t want to work with again.

 

COBOL, used on mainframe computers, ranked number one for most hated programming language. VBA, Matlab, Objective-C, and Groovy all followed down the list. Although developers can’t choose the organization’s preferred programming language, businesses should take note of Overflow’s developer survey when looking to hire programmers. That’s because they may need to offer more benefits or languages for job roles that rely on COBOL, Assembly, Perl, C, and less common programming languages.

 

The survey results also revealed which programming languages coders love the most. For the sixth straight year, Rust ranked number one on the list. However, only 5,044 developers nominated Rust compared to TypeScript, ranked 3rd with 18,711 nominations. TypeScript is Microsoft’s take on JavaScript, featuring a type system that compiles into javaScript to make developers more productive. Other popular languages include Python, Elixir, Clojure, Julia, Swift, Dart, Node.js, and Go.

 

The results also show the most popular databases, cloud computing platforms, developer tools, online collaboration software, web frameworks, and operating systems.

 

What’s your personal most and least loved programming language?

 

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Top Comments

  • What! No Squirrel programming language.

     

    I was surprised to see Erlang (4th from the bottom, with a score of 0.79%) on the list.  A buddy of mine, wrote a program in Erlang to act as an intelligent router for our Zigbee network.  He barely got the program to work (which he did in a surprisingly short amount of time, while learning the  language) and then left the company.  He walked me through the code and instructed me on how to build and install the software, but try as I might, I could never understand how it worked or how to successfully add, delete or modify functionality.  I hammered on it for days, trying to add trace/debug messages, make small tweaks, just about anything. But, it just would not sink in (and I have mastered many different languages).  Mind you, this all occurred within a year of my retirement, as my brain started having troubles learning anything. I was so glad to finally be told by my boss to let it go, I don't think I have ever given up on something so quickly in my life.

  • in reply to genebren

    Yes, there was a period where it was extremely difficult to get VB working, and I think it still requires a couple of tweaks, but I'm not having any issues at the moment.

    I just wish people were still making cool OCXs for newer technology.

  • in reply to genebren

    I still use VB6 sometimes - I have loads of useful progs written in it for instrument control .

    I'm attempting a move over to Xojo but I really don't want to re-write everything.

     

    VB6 IDE and programmes will run on Windows 10  but there are one or two unfixable things in the IDE that are not quite right - so I think I'll need to move on.

     

    It's obviously not high on Microsoft's priority list.

     

    The great thing is that you can put together an acceptable GUI with acceptable performance so quickly and easily.

     

    MK

  • in reply to dougw

    I think I hated VB6 initially because I absolutely hated programming within the windows environment.  I agree that VB6 (and later versions) allow you to rapidly create tools that would take a tremendous amount of energy to create in Visual C.  I remember sitting down an trying to create a similar program to one in VB, in Visual C, and it was nearly impossible (to me) and I have years of experience creating windows programs in C and assembly (down to message handlers, resource files....).  

  • in reply to dougw

    I had assumed that it no longer worked.  I had a fair number of tools that I had built on VB6 and around the time that I switched to Windows 7 Pro and 64 bits, they all quit working.  I even remember try to tweak some of the tools and I could not get them to work.  I have since moved on to VB2008, which works in similar ways, but does require more work to synchronize things like comm ports into the rest of the event driven work.