Results of the programming paradigms survey

2015-06-25 00:11  plsurveyresults    [permalink]

A while ago I created a little survey about programming language specifics, and posted it on reddit/programming. Here are the results.

There were 123 responses on May 21st, 8 on May 22nd and one more on the 23rd. I guess then it moved off the first page on reddit... The posted ended on a solid score of zero upvotes.

Whitespace: the majority of you (93 votes) like whitespace to be unimportant to syntax, the others (34) like that it defines scope or levels in code.

Compare-Assign: 121 selected "A single equals-sign "=" is comparison, assignment is something visibily different, e.g. ":=" [Pascal, Nim].", which I find strange, since it's not what the 'top' languages do (C-family, Java, JavaScript). Perhaps I hit a specific public on reddit that happens to prefer sub-top languages that have indeed made a sane selection in operators in comparison and assignment. Perhaps it just the formulation of the question that threw people off.
6 prefer not to use an operator for assignment. Some nice people note that Lisp uses (set! ) for assignment, and Scheme uses equal, which are not really operators. Someone warns not to use == in Java for general comparison. Good to know. (Reminds me to send the daily thank you to the person that once warned me not to use Java.)

Readability: 87 like code to read like human language, against 41 that appreciate that it's for the machines that we're writing. So that's bad news for my attempt at designing a programming language without reserved words...

Subject Object Verb: 109 prefer infix notation (a+b), 15 prefer prefix notation (+ a b), 1 voted postfix (a b +) and 7 prefer something else than operators.

Declarative-Executive: 60 like declarative and executive separate and can live without having them nested, 16 find that declarative and executive should be visually separate but may occur nested, 47 think executive prevails (so they can manipulate their declarative, eew!)

Compiler directives, Pre-compiler: 49 prefer language specific syntax to denote code that is dependent on something external, 39 prefer the linker to be smart enough to ignore unused logic, 38 sticks to the heavy pre-compiler with its own box of tricks.

Garbage collection: 57 likes reference counting; 43 doesn't even bother with clean-up or gives the GC a ping; 26 does their own object lifetime management (or is unwittingly writing leaks).

Multiple Inheritence: 88 claim not to need it; 38 claim to use it; 3 claim do be blissfully oblivious, the lucky bastards.

Concurrency: 80 prefer syntax to work with a parallel workload, 36 likes to just write loops and have the language put the metal to work, 14 roll their own threads.

Generics: Yea 98, Nay 32, the yeas have it. Another reminder I'm part of a (shrinking?) minority...

As I noted in the reddit remarks, I'm not used to setting up surveys like this, and may not have selected the most neutral wordings for the questionnaire, perhaps steering the results a little. In any case, it's nice to hear back from people, and compare where you are in relation to the masses, get to know if your niche is still comfortably narrow.

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