Which Are The Most Loved and Most Hated Programming Languages | 2017

Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2017 gives us a pretty good idea of the current state of programming languages and developers. According to this year’s results, Rust is the most loved programming language, followed by Smalltalk and TypeScript. On the most dreaded/hated front, Visual Basic continues to reign.

Last week, Stack Overflow released its much anticipated annual developer survey. This popular online community of programmers releases this survey each year and provides a pretty good idea of the latest programming trends and the preferences of the programmers.

Developer Survey 2017 was Stack Overflow’s biggest yet as it covered about 64,000 developers. In my previous article, I talked about the popularity of different programming languages, libraries, frameworks, and databases. JavaScript topped the list of the languages for the fifth time in a row.

In this article, I’ll be telling you about the most loved and most hated programming languages. It should be noted that Stack Overflow 2017 survey lists the Most Dreaded languages and I’ve taken the liberty to call those the Most Hated languages.

25 Most Loved Programming Languages

In last year’s survey, Rust programming language ruled this list. Interestingly, Rust continues to do so even in 2017. Rust is followed by Smalltalk and TypeScript. This ranking is a clear signal that compared to other languages, the developers are most willing to work (or continue working) with Swift.

Last year, Apple’s open source programming language Swift took the #2 spot. Well, this year, Swift has slipped to #4. It doesn’t mean Swift’s popularity is declining. The language ranked well on this year’s popularity charts and its demand is growing.

Here’s the list of top 25 most loved programming languages:

1. Rust
2. Smalltalk
3. TypeScript
4. Swift
5. Go
6. Python
7. Elixir
8. C#
9. Scala
10. Clojure
11. JavaScript
12. F#
13. Haskell
14. SQL
15. C++
16. Julia
17. Java
18. R
19. Ruby
20. C
21. PHP
22. Erlang
23. Dart
24. Common Lisp
25. Groovy

25 Most Hated/Dreaded Programming Languages

Just like the last year’s results, this year, Visual Basic was again listed as the most dreaded programming language. Just in case you’re wondering what’s the meaning of most dreaded, it shows that a high percentage of developers who’re currently using the technology aren’t interested in continuing to do so.

Visual Basic was followed by VBA, CoffeeScript, VB.NET, and Matlab.

Here are the top 25 most hated/dreaded languages:

1. Visual Basic 6
2. VBA
3. CoffeeScript
4. VB.NET
5. Matlab
6. Objective-C
7. Assembly
8. Perl
9. Lua
10. Hack
11. Groovy
12. Common Lisp
13. Dart
14. Erland
15. PHP
16. C
17. Ruby
18. R
19. Java
20. Julia
21. C++
22. SQL
23. Haskell
24. F#
25. JavaScript

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