Which Programming Languages Developers Hate Most – Survey Insights and Trends

Least Disliked Programming Languages (Stack Overflow Developer Story analysis)

Stack Overflow extracts "dislike" tags from developers’ public Developer Stories and applies a Bayesian estimator to compute the expected proportion of developers who mark a language as disliked. The three languages with the highest estimated dislike rates are Perl , Delphi and VBA . The next most‑disliked languages are PHP , Objective‑C , CoffeeScript and Ruby .

Conversely, languages that receive very few dislike tags tend to show rapid usage growth. The survey highlights R , Python , TypeScript , Go and Rust as fast‑growing.

When the dislike percentage exceeds 3 % (based on responses from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Canada), the language’s usage trend is negative. Languages with <3 % dislike—such as R , Rust , TypeScript and Kotlin —show strong upward momentum.

Technologies Developers Like and Dislike

Beyond languages, the same data set records preferences for broader technologies. The most frequently liked technologies are:

Machine Learning

Git

Python 3.x

HTML5

CSS3

The most frequently disliked technologies are:

Internet Explorer

Visual Basic

Flash

COBOL

Fortran

Pascal

Independent Tag Networks

By constructing a graph where each node is a tag and edges represent co‑occurrence in a Developer Story, distinct sub‑ecosystems emerge:

Microsoft cluster : centered on C# and .NET PHP cluster : includes WordPress and Drupal Mobile development cluster : dominated by Objective‑C Operating‑system tags form another cluster: OSX and Windows are frequently marked as disliked, whereas Linux, Ubuntu and Unix are not.

Competitive Technology Landscape

The tag network also reflects well‑known competitive rivalries, for example:

Linux/OSX vs. Windows

Git vs. SVN

Vim vs. Emacs

React vs. Angular

These patterns suggest that developers tend to adopt newer, more modern tools and abandon those perceived as legacy, although the data does not prove causality.

Python as the Preferred Language for Data Scientists (Kaggle 2017 Survey)

Kaggle’s 2017 Machine Learning & Data Science Survey collected over 16 000 responses worldwide. Key quantitative findings are summarized below.

Age

The average respondent age is about 30 years. Regional variation is notable; for example, the median age of respondents from India is roughly nine years younger than that of Australia.

Education

Most respondents hold a master’s degree.

Respondents earning > $150 K per year are predominantly PhD holders.

The median annual salary for master‑level data‑science professionals is approximately $55 000 (US dollars).

Full‑time Salary

Machine‑learning engineers in the United States have the highest median salary (~$55 441). The global median is lower because many respondents are not employed full‑time (salary reported as $0).

Most Common Data‑Science Methods

Outside of military and national‑security domains, logistic regression is the most frequently used statistical method. Neural‑network techniques are also widely adopted.

Tools Used at Work

Git is the dominant code‑sharing platform (58.4 % of respondents).

Large enterprises often keep code in internal repositories or share via email, whereas startups favor cloud‑based services.

Most Used Data Types

Relational (tabular) data dominates in industry settings. In academia and defense, text and image data are more common.

Recommended First Language for Data‑Science Beginners

Both Python and R receive strong recommendations. Among respondents who use both languages, Python is recommended roughly twice as often as R.

Learning Platforms

Practitioners keep their knowledge up‑to‑date through:

Stack Overflow Q&A

Technical conferences

Podcasts

Online community resources

Open Data Sources

Dataset aggregators rank second only to Google Search as the most common way to locate open data sets for practice projects.