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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."

3 of 254 comments (clear)

  1. One for one by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    C++ deserves its spot, it's pretty screwed up. I haven't dealt with Lua or Scala, so I can't comment on either. However, I imagine this probably also scales directly with the popularity of the language and indirectly with the skill of the people writing in it. So Lua would make sense; it's popular and seems to attract a lot of amateurs. I'm surprised PHP is so low, though; I hear horror stories about it that make me glad I never have to touch it.

    1. Re:One for one by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      There's even a website dedicated to PHP WTFs

      Consider that a language (rather than a programmer) causes a WTF moment when it behaves other than would intuitively be expected according to its own rules of grammar. On that basis alone, PHP wins hands down.

  2. My WTF by EmperorOfCanada · · Score: 3, Interesting

    My WTF would be people posting Visual Basic to GitHub. Then another WTF for anyone posting cobol to Github. My next WTF would be where the WTF is directed. Is it directed at the code or away from the code. Also many might be directed at the language or even a specific implementation. So my regular WTF in Objective-C would be theInsanelyLongDefinedParametersThatAreUsedInTheNS library. But when it comes to much of my own past perl code I suspect I would comment WTF in that in my Perl days I could twist a regular expression into pretty much anything.

    But when you are getting to a lower level as in C and C++ you are going to be running up against strangeness in libraries like OpenGL and might be writing a comment such as "WTF won't nVidia release a proper library for Linux?" Or "WTF is wrong with the Android NDK and getting GPS data in C++?"