Can a programming language make you happy?
Tim Finin, 8:03pm 11 May 2009We all know that some programming languages are a joy to use and others can be damned painful. Lukas Biewald ran an interesting experiment to gather some data about this in his post, The Programming Language with the Happiest Users.
“Which languages make programmers the happiest? … I decided to do a little market research. I scraped the top 150 most recent tweets on Twitter for the query “X language” where X was one of {COBOL, Ruby, Fortran, Python, Visual Basic, Perl, Java, Haskell, Lisp, C}. Then I asked three people on Amazon Mechanical Turk to verify that the tweet was on the topic. If so, I asked if the tweet seemed positive, negative or neutral. …”
Great idea and a nice use of Amazon Mechanical Turk!
Ebiquity Blog
May 11th, 2009 at 8:30 pm
I agree, C, though it is very powerful, is also very hard to use. LISP is deffo fun, but you’d go crazy over the sheer number of parentheses! I wonder why PHP isn’t here?
May 14th, 2009 at 6:22 am
Lisp is making a real comeback. I recently ran the International Lisp Conference 2009 (ilc09.org) and there’s quite a lot of exciting stuff going on. I work at ITA Software, where we are building a new airline reservation system; I’m one of the assistant architects. The core is written in Common Lisp, about 600,000 lines of code, not counting open-source libraries. It’s great!
May 16th, 2009 at 9:33 am
Java has the be the most wretched language to learn. I used to hate C++. That was until I jumped into the horrifying world of Java.