[NA] Which programming language is the worst?

[Ed Haywood]

Reminds me of my first experience with Ada. I was building a predictive parser and so had a very complex data structure to be initialized at compile time. (School project, not how I'd do it in real life.) I bought the compiler to save time as I was working full time and could afford it. It was considered one of the best PC Ada compilers in the early 90s but I don't remember the vendor. Dang thing would fall all the way through 30+ full page (on the screen) elements in the data structure initialization, hit the final closing curly brace and say the equivalent of "I dunno. Broke." I culled the data structure down to two elements and spent several hours debugging the syntax until that worked. Then built up all the elements until it was complete. I will say, once it compiled, there was one small logic error that I caught and corrected and it ran flawlessly. But after years spent in C where if the compiler could somehow make some sense it would compile (maybe not what you wanted, but that's a you problem, programmer) It was incredibly frustrating. Later compilers were, I'm sure, much better.

That is consistent with the design philosophy of Ada. It's a feature, not a bug.

 

[jsstevens]

That is consistent with the design philosophy of Ada. It's a feature, not a big.

The "if it compiles it works" is certainly the design philosophy of Ada. The "compilation error message is completely useless for finding the problem" not so much.

 

[Albany Tom]

Nobody ever programmed an analog computer?

View attachment 140848

Not for hire! You're reminding me of the saying "if there is a trim pot, it will be set wrong". Which then lead to the incredibly naive thought that people had years ago "if we just made this stuff adjustable in software, then we could reduce our ongoing maintenance costs because we could adjust it remotely." Maybe the most incorrect belief in engineering after the idea that we could routinely use uncontrolled fission to cut highway right of ways faster.