The Most WTF-y Programming Languages

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday September 25, 2013 @08:45AM 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."

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Re:One for one by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-25 09:43 · 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.