Perl is the most hated programming language

What do computer programmers not want to code in? Perl, the Old Spice of programming languages, is the most disliked by a significant margin, reports Stack Overflow. Delphi, used by children to write viruses for adults, and Visual Basic, used by adults to write games for children, are running neck-and-neck for second place.

Trailing far behind are PHP, for people who still don't care about security, and Objective-C, for people who still don't realize they work for Apple. Coffeescript, a language designed to make Javascript more annoying, takes sixth spot; Ruby, very briefly popular among people who wanted to write web apps without actually doing any work, lurks in seventh.

If youve read some of our other posts about the growing and shrinking programming languages, you might notice that the least disliked tags tend to be fast-growing ones. R, Python, Typescript, Go, and Rust are all fast-growing in terms of Stack Overflow activity (weve specifically explored Python and R before) and all are among the least polarizing languages. Similarly, many of the shrinking tags, such as Perl, Objective-C, and Ruby, are ones weve previously observed to be among the fastest-shrinking tags on the site.