@sumireko said in Which language is the least bad?:
There are no bad languages, just bad coders.
Of course there are bad languages (which is not to say that there aren't bad coders, don't get me started on that one). There are languages designed so clumsily that instead of creating the logic you want you're fighting an uphill battle against the mouthbreathing moron(s) who designed the language (for an example of this, see this piece PHP which was linked somewhere upthread I think). Then there are languages that are mostly sane, but have this one feature that trips you up over and over and over again, and you're pretty sure the designers put it in there just to be cute (looking at you, Elixir).
@sumireko said in Which language is the least bad?:
Even ES6 can be turned into a modern masterpiece using the right people.
ES6 is not the problem itself, it's (comparatively) not as clumsy as the previous versions and (again, comparatively) a step in the right direction. The bullshit about ES6 lies partly in the fact that it's supported almost absolutely nowhere (maaaybe Node has complete support by now? No browsers tho) so if you want to use it you condemn yourself to using some of the shittiest tooling in the universe.
<rant>Oh, and if you want to support something besides the latest and greatest browsers, then you better watch your step because Babel ain't your mother and its authors admit freely that their transpiler simply fucks up sometimes because they're too lazy to fix it. And from my experience that list isn't even complete.</rant>
The other bullshit part about ES6 is that while it helps writing somewhat sanely-looking code, the internals didn't change one bit. It's all fine and dandy that they've added a class
keyword now, but it's just syntactic sugar on top of regular objects, so that sucks anyway.
For language that's not hard to read and write, Ruby doesn't suck. If you want something fast though, I've been enjoying Rust lately, but I don't know it well enough to tell whether it sucks or not yet.