[chrisaycock]

The article defines "like" vs "dislike" in terms of what developers list as preferences on their jobs profile. For example, Perl is the most "disliked" language; what that really means is that developers have actively listed it as a job opportunity they don't want.

The analysis shows that there is a correlation between a language's "liked-ness" and its growth as a tag on Stack Overflow. Correlation-is-not-causation and all that, though it seems that what developers will take for a job is similar to what they actively use. This, of course, is rather cyclic.

[dozzie]

> For example, Perl is the most "disliked" language; what that really means is that developers have actively listed it as a job opportunity they don't want.

In the specific case of Perl, this makes the analysis highly skewed. I liked using Perl (I no longer write in it because my current team already knew Python well and not even a bit of Perl), but almost all the job ads around me that mention Perl come from big, old corporations. I wouldn't want to maintain a corporate internal tool written in Perl, because Perl in such an environment means a very old and overgrown script (virtually all newer are written in Python) in a complex and complicated system that cannot be updated to modern architectural standards, and Perl from '90s and early '00s has a history of being used mainly by dilettantes who couldn't tell global and local variables apart.

[petre]

We have rewritten a web app that used CGI.pm and ported it to Mojolicious. It also uses JavaScript on the front end. I'll choose Perl any day over JavaScript/ES/Node.js. There is still innovation going on in the Perl5 community, like Mojolicious, Promises, Moo, MOP, Moxie etc. Most tooling is sane and you don't end up with competing package managers, a plethora of build tools, transpilers, frameworks and an endless chain of dependencies.

[vidarh]

That's a good point - I'd never list COBOL, or APL or any number of other languages I'd never want to program in, on my jobs profile because I've never, ever been approached for jobs in those languages (and if I did, it'd be a novelty to be approached about it). Java, on the other hand, I might list because it's a major, popular language that I personally dislike working in. Doesn't mean I consider Java worse than COBOL.

[jeffwass]

On a somewhat related note, in hardware space :

Twenty years ago I practically got a job offer merely by asking a question on Usenet about a particular piece of test equipment.

IIRC it was some HP 'bed-of-nails' beast for programmatically testing circuit boards. You would setting pins as inputs/outputs, analog or digital, give pulse or waveform patterns, etc.

It sounds really cool, but this thing was horrendous to use, you had to run it on a specialized HP-UX box with a Motif interface, and it was not very pleasant.

But I was surprised that by asking one random question on some HP or Motif usenet forum (which I don't believe I could get anybody to answer), some tech company was practically offering me a job to use this system for their own test workflow.

I refused, but it did give me some confidence knowing I had some obscure job skills I could fall back on if needed.

[symlinkk]

Exactly, they're not disliked because they're bad languages, they're disliked because they're dead-end career choices.