[NA] Which programming language is the worst?

What is the worst language you've had to code in?

  • Perl

    Votes: 5 13.5%

  • C

    Votes: 1 2.7%

  • Cobol

    Votes: 6 16.2%

  • Fortran

    Votes: 6 16.2%

  • Assembly

    Votes: 4 10.8%

  • LISP

    Votes: 6 16.2%

  • Java

    Votes: 4 10.8%

  • C++

    Votes: 3 8.1%

  • Some proprietary non-sense

    Votes: 14 37.8%

  • Basic

    Votes: 4 10.8%
  • Total voters
    37
ArrowFlyer86

ArrowFlyer86

En-Route
PoA Supporter
Joined
Jul 17, 2019
Messages
3,285
Location
Around
Display Name
Flight
Since rough river reminded me that pilots are essentially just a collection of disillusioned IT workers, I want to ask: what's the worst language you've ever programmed in? Why?

For me it's Perl because deciphering it early in my career (pre-AI) when it was written by a 50+ year old colleague experienced in coding it for a long time, it made me want to $action = "hang myself";
 
I'm a C / C++ fanboy... was also partial to Perl. Hated COBOL and Java. Haven't written code since I was in the service.
 
If you think your personally-most-hated programming language is bad, maybe you'll feel better about it after reading about these:
www.hongkiat.com

25 Most Bizarre Programming Languages

Some people say learning to program is hard, tedious and excruciating. It's like learning a new language, just to talk to a machine which needs to be told
www.hongkiat.com www.hongkiat.com
 
Hard to dislike C/c++ IMHO... Plus I can use them for MCUs :)

But perl? Good God. It's so ugly, readability wasn't even kind of in the specs for the language. There's time back in 2013-2016 (when I had to dip into it) where I seriously thought about resigning rather than fixing some cryptic broken ****.
 
Jim_R said:
If you think your personally-most-hated programming language is bad, maybe you'll feel better about it after reading about these:
www.hongkiat.com

25 Most Bizarre Programming Languages

Some people say learning to program is hard, tedious and excruciating. It's like learning a new language, just to talk to a machine which needs to be told
www.hongkiat.com www.hongkiat.com
Click to expand...
This looks like a collection of clowntown languages! How many of those were serious, even kind of adopted languages?!
 
Never made it past Basic and QBasic back in high school. At least gave me enough foundation about programming to make using Excel and HTML easy with just a little Googling to find the correct commands.
 
Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe said:
Never used Cobal.

C, FORTRAN, Assembly, Matlab - OK by me. C++ never used enough...

Basic sucks.
Click to expand...
COBOL is extremely verbose.

I spend most of my workday writing SQL, which is also verbose an has limited control structures and limited abstraction. One thing that bugs me about it is that or many people who don't do a lot of it write it as one long statement. They'd never write a C# program like that.
 
80x86 assembly, specifically the memory models. I find it difficult to believe that the series was developed before the widespread adoption of crack cocaine. That it won out over the 68000 series is proof that the pc industry evolved much more because of business relationships than technical superiority. And yeah, this is all more hardware than software.
 
ArrowFlyer86 said:
All bucketed together, like they will be in hell.


I feel like this is a cop out...
What do you program space machines in? (Isn't that what you did/do?)
Click to expand...
Depends....Ada is still really big, running on 1985 chips because both are incredibly rugged and handle space environment very well. Newer rockets are being written in C++ and running on (gasp!) 1992 chips. These aint Nvidia or Intel chips, either. The software itself is much simpler than people imagine. Boring, even. I wrote a utility to manage launch parameters in Python. In-flight & mission-critical software is still usually Ada. There's a reason, feel free to look it up. ANSI/MIL-STD 1815A.
 
FormerHangie said:
COBOL is extremely verbose.

I spend most of my workday writing SQL, which is also verbose an has limited control structures and limited abstraction. One thing that bugs me about it is that or many people who don't do a lot of it write it as one long statement. They'd never write a C# program like that.
Click to expand...
A bit of history. In most modern languages, new versions may be named by year of acceptance or even sequential. For example, Python 2.x evolved to Python 3.x. Versions of FORTRAN were year-based, e.g. Fortran 66, Fortran 77, Fortran 90 and the ultimate obscenity, Object-Oriented Fortran (yuck). Bjorn loved C but wanted more, so he invented C++. The ++ is the increment operator in C++, among other languages, which means increment the value of the variable by one. Hence C++ was one increment better than C. COBOL, not one to miss the boat, has an improved version, named ADD_1_TO_COBOL.
 
Iunno they all basically do the same shiz.

Except, I once had a 9 month contract working with Mozilla's XUL. Think Visual Basic for the desktop, for the browser, using XMLish bastardized tags. It was a hot hot HOT mess.

To make it worse, there was some sort of significant limitation with the middle tier Oracle connector and we could not use stored procedures. I wrote some ungodly SQL queries in a 200-table schema. nested upon nested subqueries. They worked fantastic, but... I would not want to be the next guy. :D

Luckily for everyone the project folded.
 
murphey said:
A bit of history. In most modern languages, new versions may be named by year of acceptance or even sequential. For example, Python 2.x evolved to Python 3.x. Versions of FORTRAN were year-based, e.g. Fortran 66, Fortran 77, Fortran 90 and the ultimate obscenity, Object-Oriented Fortran (yuck). Bjorn loved C but wanted more, so he invented C++. The ++ is the increment operator in C++, among other languages, which means increment the value of the variable by one. Hence C++ was one increment better than C. COBOL, not one to miss the boat, has an improved version, named ADD_1_TO_COBOL.
Click to expand...
You got no idea how rarely I get to use that joke.
 
While I have no personal experience with it, I've heard it said that they made Perl by combining all of the bad aspects of other languages into one single, terrible language.

murphey said:
Versions of FORTRAN were year-based, e.g. Fortran 66, Fortran 77, Fortran 90 and the ultimate obscenity, Object-Oriented Fortran (yuck).
Click to expand...
Don't you mean, OOF? ;)
 
So you guys use/used these languages, which is amazing to an outsider like me (I did BASIC in high school) but who creates the languages? Not sure what I’m even asking, lol.
 
All orifices are pink, all airplanes fly, all programming languages are Turing machines.

Also, your favorite band sucks, and the sportsball team from my area is superior to the sportsball team from your area.
 
I started in C/C++ and Perl. I later had a contract gig at one point that was solely in Perl backend coding and considered myself proficient in it.

However, I believe I offended an oldtimer that was the Perl "guru" at that place (aka wrote spaghetti code no one else could read) when I said, "No one can really write _good_ Perl code." He was legitimately offended, and I felt satisfied that I was correct. :D
 
mark.staggs said:
I started in C/C++ and Perl. I later had a contract gig at one point that was solely in Perl backend coding and considered myself proficient in it.

However, I believe I offended an oldtimer that was the Perl "guru" at that place (aka wrote spaghetti code no one else could read) when I said, "No one can really write _good_ Perl code." He was legitimately offended, and I felt satisfied that I was correct. :D
Click to expand...
Perl was a cluster. I started to learn it and after a bit was like, I will be unhappy anytime in using this language and did not proceed. So <% I switched to that first iteration %> of ASP and found it to make more sense.
 
Albany Tom said:
80x86 assembly, specifically the memory models. I find it difficult to believe that the series was developed before the widespread adoption of crack cocaine. That it won out over the 68000 series is proof that the pc industry evolved much more because of business relationships than technical superiority. And yeah, this is all more hardware than software.
Click to expand...
Heh, a very inside joke.

Way back in the day I programmed systems using the 6502.

Then I saw the Futurama episode with the F-Ray. Like the X-Ray, but different. Fry and Bender used it on each other. Turns out we found out what drives Bender.

IMG_8856.png
 
I learned BASIC on my own, and later FORTRAN, as an ME student. I kind of got in to the coding part and learned C, using the Borland Turbo C compiler. I rewrote a FORTRAN assignment we had to invert a matrix in to C, and developed a program to plot pump curves overlaid on hydraulic system curves. It was even graphic. It will still run using a DOS compatibility program. This was in the early 90's.

I even posted my program on a shareware site, and got money for it. Some bills in a letter from a university professor in Spain, asking me if I was planning on developing it for Windows. As I got in to it, that was a lot easier said than done. Probably 90% of the coding was for graphics and data entry, and that would have to all be redone from scratch.
 
Initial Fix said:
Loved Fortran, c,c++, python
Click to expand...
You'll notice Python wasn't even an option for most hated in the vote list... No one in their right mind would think to vote that :)

Though the only thing I dislike about Py is that in my industry (finance/data science), a lot of people learn like 3 pandas functions and declare themselves competent engineers (advent of GPT has not helped).
It's a lot like people who discover VLOOKUP for the first time and think they're now an Excel whiz...
 
LISP is the worst:
Lots of Idiotic, Stupid Parentheses.

I wrote a lot of FORTRAN, C, and Assembly code over the years, and a bit of C++, dBase, and COBOL thrown in for giggles.

Thankfully, I'm no longer a full-time coder. I don't think I have the requisite patience for it anymore.
 
Salty said:
You missed Python, which has released a plague of wannabe developers writing garbage, unmaintainable code.
Click to expand...
Thank you for reinforcing my point made above, cited here:
ArrowFlyer86 said:
Though the only thing I dislike about Py is that in my industry (finance/data science), a lot of people learn like 3 pandas functions and declare themselves competent engineers (advent of GPT has not helped).
It's a lot like people who discover VLOOKUP for the first time and think they're now an Excel whiz...
Click to expand...

I agree with the sentiment, but I feel like that's less a damnation of the language and more of the culture. Py is approachable enough where you can trick yourself into thinking you're good at it when you definitely aren't.
For instance, I've had people forward me interactive Jupyter notebooks, complete with all the EDA, random side quests they pursued, and errors they encountered -- and then pass it off as "their program" ready for production. It's literally just a CTRL+C/CTRL+V of an interactive session, not a real utility. They should not, in any universe, consider themselves devs.
 
ArrowFlyer86 said:
Thank you for reinforcing my point made above, cited here:


I agree with the sentiment, but I feel like that's less a damnation of the language and more of the culture. Py is approachable enough where you can trick yourself into thinking you're good at it when you definitely aren't.
For instance, I've had people forward me interactive Jupyter notebooks, complete with all the EDA, random side quests they pursued, and errors they encountered -- and then pass it off as "their program" ready for production. It's literally just a CTRL+C/CTRL+V of an interactive session, not a real utility. They should not, in any universe, consider themselves devs.
Click to expand...
Ok, I hate the language too. :p

Using invisible characters to determine scope is just plain evil incarnate.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top