Language Suckiness Shootout
Monday 22 December 2008 - Filed under Uncategorized
Like everyone, I have my opinions on which languages should be used and which should ideally be swept under the carpet and their existence denied. For example, I think C is fantastic, Haskell pretty cool but a bit mind-bending, and PHP should die a horrible lonely death along with various 4GLs, Cobol, Ruby and pre-1990 Fortran.
However, my opinion is just one out of millions on the internets, so let’s see what Google thinks*.
| Language | ‘X Sucks’ | ‘X Rocks’ |
| C | 19.1 M | 23.1 M |
| C++ | 459 K | 72 K |
| C# | 314 K | 313 K |
| Haskell | 83 K | 2.1 M |
| Cobol | 37 K | 340 K |
| Fortran | 39 K | 446 K |
| Java | 221 K | 4.3 M |
| Perl | 580 K | 775 K |
| Python | 1.1 M | 174 K |
| PHP | 621 K | 10.7 M |
| Ruby | 1.9 M | 283 K |
No surprises here. C still reigns supreme, and the community around the scripting languages is even more full of trolls than ever before.
* No real science occurred in the building of this table.
2008-12-22 » admin
22 December 2008 @ 11:26 am
Want to compute the ratios of sucks / rocks, to get a community-size independent measure of happiness?
E.g.
Rocks:
Haskell 25.3x rocks
PHP 17.0x rocks
C 1.2 x rocks
Sucks:
Ruby 0.14x sucks
22 December 2008 @ 12:06 pm
My googling numbers look a lot different from yours.
Ruby rocks: 36,700
Ruby sucks: 4,130
Python rocks: 20,300
Python sucks: 2,690
C rocks: 25,100
C sucks: 11,800
You are putting this stuff in quotation marks, right?
10 June 2010 @ 6:15 am
An update about ruby:
google “ruby rocks” About 127,000 results
google “ruby sucks” About 23,600 results
Things changed a lot in these 1.5 years