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From: Kragen Javier Sitaker <kragen@canonical.org>
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Subject: Re: =?utf-8?Q?What=E2=80=99s?= Your Least Favourite Programming Language?
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2026 20:09:22 -0300
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Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:
> The most popular answer was JavaScript, with 4 votes. There were 2
> votes for PHP, and one each for Lisp and Python.

This sounds like a pretty small number of votes.  Back in 02017, before
descending into racketeering and criminal copyleft violation, Stack
Overflow wrote a post about “the most disliked programming languages”:
<https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/10/31/disliked-programming-languages/>

This was based on each user account adding tags to “liked” and
“disliked” lists.  The proportionally most disliked (over 15%) were:

- #perl
- #delphi
- #vba

And then, far behind those, between 5% and 10%:

- #php
- #objective-c
- #coffeescript
- #ruby

Nothing else was really close, although the C# confidence interval does
barely overlap 5% from below.  Python was down around 1.5% dislikes.

> One mentioned COBOL (which for him was worse than Fortran), but nobody
> thought of BASIC. I guess that is now so far in the past, many among
> the interviewees wouldn’t even have any memories of using it ...

I didn’t think it was controversial that COBOL was worse than Fortran?
VBA was #3 on SO’s list.

Kragen