Paul Graham thinks Java “[smells] supicious”. One of his reasons is:
4. No one loves it. C, Perl, Python, Smalltalk, and Lisp programmers love their languages. I’ve never heard anyone say that they loved Java.
But I think some people do love java. In fact if you put “I love Java” into google you get approximately 2,530 results. “I hate Java” did get 768 results though. This got me thinking about how some programming lannguages are loved, like Perl in 1999 (before the backlash about it being “write-only”). PHP, then Python and Ruby emerged in a similar way from the hacker community and also seem to be loved. I decided to extend my unscientific test.
Some languages had to be excluded from the test because their results were just noise: Icon, Joy, Eiffel (apparently there’s a band of that name). Sisal, T-SQL and Intercal (at least) don’t really have enough information even for this rough test (a very small number of “I love”s and no “I hate”s making them appear to be the most popular languages).
Ruby’s outstanding result should not be taken too seriously as it was definitely more polluted by noise than a language like Smalltalk (no one says, “I love Smalltalk” unless they mean the programming language). Nevertheless a quick skim through the results seemed to show that most of them related to the programming language.
Three of the top five languages by love/hate are the “community” languages Ruby (1), Python (2) and PHP (5). Perl, however is way down at 10 (below Java). Of the other languages in the top five, Smalltalk was developed by a small group at Xerox Parc and the rapidly expanding C# is, of course, a Microsoft creation (unless you count the 10 years of prototyping done by Sun).
The languages that inspire much more hate than love are the perennial whipping boys VB and VBScript as well as JavaScript (hatred due at least in part to the terrible environment in which it usually operates – incompatible browsers) and (hilariously) C++ in which an awful lot of desktop apps are written.
Java comes ninth. That’s above Perl in tenth, C in twelfth and Lisp in fourteenth – three of Paul’s “loved” languages.
PHP has the most people willing to proclaim their love (4,070) but also a significant number of detractors (772). In fact, by volume Java lovers are the second largest group (2,530). Java has obviously picked up a lot of adherents since April 2001 (when the article was written).
If you liked this you will probably like the follow up, Does Anyone Love Java?
You may also find my jobs by programming language page interesting.
