[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++.