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Stackoverflow has published a study on their blog for the most disliked programming languages. To come up with this list, stackoverflow studied developer inputs for stackoverflow jobs.
When developers are creating their stories to showcase their achievements and skills, stackoverflow provides an option for developers to choose which languages they would like to work with and which they would not. This provides an accurate metric for both disliked and liked languages by developers on the stackoverflow site.
This offers us an opportunity to examine the opinions of hundreds of thousands of developers. There are many ways to measure the popularity of a language; for example, we’ve often used stackoverflow visits or question views to measure such trends. But this dataset is a rare way to find out what technologies people tend to dislike, when given the opportunity to say so on their CV.
Method of Measure
To measure which is the most disliked languages, stackoverflow came up with the following formula: They compared the fraction of time a disliked tag appeared in someone else liked or disliked tags. If it’s 50%, it means equal people liked and disliked it while it’s 1% means 99 liked the language as compared to just 1 who disliked it.
Most Disliked Programming Languages
Based on the above methodology, here are the 10 most disliked programming languages:
- Perl – 19%
- Delphi – 19%
- VBA – 17%
- PHP – 9%
- Objective-C – 9%
- Coffeescript – 8%
- Ruby – 7%
- C# (C-Sharp) – 5%
- Java – 4%
- C++ - 3%
Least Disliked Programming Languages
Also, here is a list of the least disliked languages from the study.
- R
- Kotlin
- Typescript
- Rust
- Bash
- Clojure
- Swift
- Python
- JavaScript
- Go
All least disliked languages had a percentage of approximately less than 2. On top of that, the least disliked languages are also the fastest growing languages. Kotlin has been gaining popularity since Google adopted it as first language for android. It got android developer attention in the Google I/O event earlier this year. Typescript on the other hand is seen as the future of JavaScript and been widely accepted by developers especially in Angular JavaScript Framework.