[baldfat]

R is the most liked! I have to say that over the past 5 years the language has really just been getting better and better.

I know a lot of people have a bad taste with R but I blame the bad non-programmers that used the language but Hadley Wickham and his tidyverse has turned this DSL into one of the best languages to use for its purpose.

[jandrese]

R is one of those languages that the only people using are the ones who seek it out. Same with lots of the trendy new languages in the "well liked" category.

The disliked languages are weighted towards older ones where people have inherited codebases over the years and been asked to maintain them. That hit Perl especially hard I think.

[jhbadger]

I probably have written more lines of R than any other language, but I wouldn't say I like it. It is just so useful because of how much stuff is implemented in it already. From time to time I get fed up with it and try to use Python or Julia, but while I like both better as languages, there is always something I would have to spend a week implementing that there already exists an R package for, so I return.

[baldfat]

I have talked with several people who were in your steps and then I mentioned that "hidden" inside of R is a scheme influenced part of the language. I ended up learning Racket, a fork from Scheme, and I have to say my enjoyment of R has grown, especially using it within the tidyverse family.

[dkarl]

Least disliked — big difference. What I see in the graph is that the dislike measured here seems to be a combination of two factors:

  1.  The badness of the language is palpable and well-understood.
  2.  It is easy to imagine that a different language could have been chosen for the task at hand.

For instance, Groovy and Go are about equally disliked. I'm not a huge Go fan, but I would expect it to be preferred as a language over Groovy. However, since it's a new language being used mostly for new systems, it's a language of choice rather than necessity. A programmer working around an annoying wart of Go can find himself thinking that his life would have been easier if only someone had been smart enough to choose language X instead. People using Groovy are working on legacy systems involving Grails, where the language choice was in the far past and may have been a good one at the time, or Gradle, where people may feel that at least Groovy is better than XML.

The same reasoning explains why Bash and Perl are on opposite extreme ends of the chart. Bash is unavoidable; Perl is as avoidable as cargo pants.

[vorg]

People tagging Like or Dislike on their programming language are usually comparing it to another one. So programmers will "like" Apache Groovy compared to Java, "dislike" Perl compared to Bash, or "dislike" Go compared to C++.