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The Most WTF-y Programming Languages

Posted by Soulskill on from the as-long-as-it's-functional dept.

itwbennett writes "A couple of years ago, developer Sammy Larbi undertook a project to identify which languages had the most instances of the string 'WTF' in their GitHub code repositories. At the time, Objective C topped the list. ITworld's Phil Johnson has updated Larbi's research using GitHub data from the last 21 months, but instead of screen-scraping GitHub search results as Larbi had done, he queried the GitHub Archive for stand-alone instances of 'WTF' in the comments attached to GitHub commits to weed out cases where the string 'WTF' was legitimately used in the code. The three most baffling languages for 2012/13: C++, Lua, and Scala. Objective C comes in at #16."

5 of 254 comments (clear)

  1. Why would seeing 'WTF' implicate the language... by Assmasher · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...instead of the code itself?

    I've seen plenty of "WTF was this guy thinking when he wrote this?" or "WTF is he trying to do here?" comments in code.

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  2. Re:One for one by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    perhaps the people who write PHP code do not realize when they have written a WTF.

    Also, to borrow a troll from theDailyWTF (.com)
    "TRWTF is Visual Basic"

  3. Statistics, the mother of all lies... by paavo512 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    According to TFA, he "calculated the average number of WTF commit comments per repository". So why not per line of code or whatever? C++ projects tend to be rather large (because it is harder to write large projects in other languages), so surely by this metric C++ would win (aka lose) here.

    If there is one thing I have learned about statistics it is that you can prove about anything you want ... unless you want and are actually able to find the correct normalizations.

  4. Re:Oh good grief. by beelsebob · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Languages are just Syntax - get over it.

    It makes me sad that so many people focus on the syntax of the language they're using. So much so, that they think that languages are just syntax.

  5. Re:C++ by geek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    IMHO, C++ is a simple, flexible, intuitive, and powerful language... IF (and only if) you know how to use it.

    So what you're saying is that it actually isn't simple, flexible and intuitive? Because if it was simple, flexible and intutive you wouldn't have to say "IF (and only if) you know how to use it." That's kind of a big contradiction.