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The Most WTF-y Programming Languages
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."
WTF?
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
...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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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"
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Brainfuck. Look it up, I can't even give a code example as it pisses off /.'s filter.
those conclusions are drawn without controling for a language usage. Since c++ is widely adopted so there will be more instances of a comment where "WTF?" is used.
Why don't use a percentage at least? Even if that was the case, the problem remains... a wtf-y language may be the most avoided and/or not present in github
Well, they DID account for it, but they did it all wrong. They counted WTFs *per repository* ...but that makes the assumption that all repositories are of equal size, which they are not. If C++ repositories have more code on average, then that simple fact could account for the increased WTFs per repository, even if everything else was equal.
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.
by using the search term "l33t".
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.
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.
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.
and even WHOSE