[alephnil]

If someone to dislike a programming language, they have usually been exposed to a codebase written it. Very few dislike something they have never encountered. That means that the language must have been popular at least at some point if a large number of people dislike it. That may either be because it is no longer considered modern (e.g. Fortran, Cobol) or different communities are split in their view for some reason (PHP, Visual basic).