Ruby is the "Most Loved" programming language
Posted by Curt Hibbs Tue, 26 Apr 2005 07:00:00 GMT
Thomas David Baker has updated his year-old post comparing the love/hate ratio of various programming languages. Ruby came out on top in in both his original survey and his newly updated survey (which was designed to reduce the number of false hits).
You’ll have to dig into the the post to find the information on Ruby because he omitted it from the main table, making Java appear to come out on top. In all fairness, he was trying to rebut a post by Paul Graham, and so his main table only includes the languages that Paul mentioned. On the other hand, he omitted the ratio calculations because that actually supported Paul Graham’s statement rather than disproving it.
No one is going to claim that this is scientifically accurate, but I do think its pretty reasonable. Basically, he did Google searches for the phrases:
"i love x" programming
"i hate x" programmingwhere x is Ruby, Java, Python, etc., and then counted the resulting hits.
In his original posting, he calculated the love/hate ratio for each language and then ordered the results from highest to lowest. This time he only presented the raw numbers. So, here are his results ordered by the love/hate ratio:
| Language | Love | Hate | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ruby | 1,450 | 13 | 111.54 |
| Python | 1,330 | 46 | 28.91 |
| Smalltalk | 57 | 3 | 19.00 |
| Perl | 1,720 | 426 | 4.04 |
| Lisp | 185 | 77 | 2.40 |
| Java | 2,680 | 1,350 | 1.99 |
| C | 872 | 506 | 1.72 |
As you can see, Ruby (my choice in the language sweepstakes) comes out on top—and by a wide margin! I was surprised that Java did not do better. I would have expected Java to come in ahead of Perl and Lisp.
Take it for what its worth (probably not much). If you hate Ruby, feel free to flame me. :-)
