News

Developer Rants Reveal Most Annoying Programming Languages

• By David Ramel
• August 8, 2016

A new community formed to let developers publicly air their rants about coding -- appropriately named devRant -- has dived into its collected data to reveal which programming languages provoke the most ire.

DevRant co-founder Tim Rogus told ADTMag the company was formed in March "for software developers to share and bond over their successes and frustrations with code, tech and life as a programmer." It lets devs rant via iOS and Android mobile apps or a Web site, which features a live rant feed.

Hexical Labs LLC, the company behind devRant, publicized its community with some data mining that resulted in an infographic that associates complaints with programming languages, finding that SQL heads that list.

"Since our launch in March we've had over 12,000 developers post over 20,000 rants, and with that we've collected lot of interesting data about developers," Rogus said in an e-mail.

"For our first dive into the data, we decided to look at rant rates by developer language," Rogus continued. "We found that devs who have SQL in their profile skills list had the highest ratio of posted rants per dev at +56.0 percent more than average. JavaScript devs were almost exactly at the overall average with their amount of complaining, while Objective-C developers appeared to be the most content with -79.9 percent fewer rants per dev compared with the average."

Rogus provided more background on the devRant community.

"We built devRant to help fill a hole in the life of developers where community is centered so much around how-to's, Q&A's, and tech news, all interesting and useful, but not necessarily connecting to the passions that drive so many of us to the profession," Rogus said. "DevRant is designed to be a fun, even edgy place to step away from the seriousness of getting the job done to the personal side of being someone who deals with very specific up's and down's that non-developers can't understand. (Developers are people too!)"

Along with devRant mobile apps available on iOS in the Apple App Store and on Android on Google Play, devRant has a companion Web site, now in beta, which features a live rant feed and lets developers search the rants.

"DevRant is where developers can express how they really feel about code, tech and the people that make programming super special (for better or worse)," the site says.

To give you a taste of the site, here's a snapshot of this morning's feed (which, be forewarned, does indeed get a little "edgy" at times):

Perhaps following the example of the xkcd developer-related comic series, devRant has also started up its own Web cartoon series (YouTube video), based on popular rants.