What are the most disliked programming languages? Of course, every developer has a language (or two, or three, or four) that they hate with a fiery passion. Sometimes they even feel compelled to write lengthy, extremely detailed explanations of that hatred. But Stack Overflow decided to take things a big step further—it crunched its massive datasets to determine, with as much statistical rigor as possible, which languages are hated by everyone. Such an analysis is possible because Stack Overflow allows developers to tag the languages they prefer not to work with. “The most disliked languages, by a fairly large margin, are Perl, Delphi, and VBA,” read the website’s note accompanying its analysis. “They’re followed by PHP, Objective-C, Coffeescript, and Ruby.” Almost every disliked language is also seeing a reduction in Stack Overflow traffic, with the notable exception of VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), an implementation of Microsoft’s Visual basic 6. “The least-disliked tags— R, Rust, Typescript and Kotlin— are all among the fast-growing tags (Typescript and Kotlin growing so quickly they had to be truncated in the plot),” the note added. Some other languages—most notably Clojure and MATLAB—are shrinking despite relatively few developers expressing any sort of dislike for them. The popularity (or lack thereof) of various programming languages is always a point of discussion among developers. Various organizations regularly issue lists of the “most popular languages,” as determined by unique algorithms. For example, the monthly TIOBE Index tosses together search-engine and aggregator results, while analyst firm RedMonk pulls data from the GitHub Archive. In the end, though, it all comes down to the languages and frameworks you feel most comfortable using, and which ones get your particular job done. Sometimes that means using a language you dislike (especially if your company prefers it). Fortunately, there are a plethora of options out there for building websites and apps.