What's your least favorite programming language?

[andrewm]

Toss-up between VB and PHP.

[Senegoid]

@Chronos

I’m tempted by the project I’m currently working on to name Fortran77. But you know what, that’s not really fair to the language. I’ve seen enough of the language that I can see that it would be possible to write really clear, clean, elegant code in it. And it even has some clever little tricks that I haven’t encountered in any other language. My problem isn’t actually with the language itself; it’s with the generations of programmers before me who have left me with this code, and of whom almost all had no clue about how to program, in any language. Good programmers can write good code in any language, and bad programmers can write bad code in any language.

Of course you understand that the determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language

I think our friend Testy from this nearby thread should see this thread, ya think?

[Chronos]

Of course you understand that the determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language

The equivalent statement has been made for C programmers. And after seeing someone write C++ code in the dinky scripting language for an IRC client, I believe it.

[ultrafilter]

@friedo

Haskell annoys me, not so much because of the language, but because the community around it is composed entirely of people with their heads up their asses.

Haskell is a really fantastic language if you’re a mathematician, but yeah, it’s not too hard to understand why it hasn’t really taken off in the non-mathematical community.

@Rysto

I’m going to go with TCL, which is a scripting language with all of the usual problems that scripting languages have without much by the way of unique features to recommend it. One particular idiocy of the language is that catch statements not only catch exceptions thrown with throw, but values returned by return. For the life of me I cannot understand how the language’s designer ever thought that could be useful.

This. I was thinking Java because I strongly disagree with the design philosophy, but at least it has one. TCL is just an abomination, like someone’s final project for a class that they blew off all semester.

[robert_columbia]

@JoelUpchurch

I think Lisp was the worst language I didn’t ever write code in. I’d get about 30 pages into the book and I’d throw the book against the wall. My brain seems to have an overflow when I nest parentheses about 5 deep…

I did some Lisp development back in the day. Here’s one of my masterpieces, or, what remains of it after a disk crash. I lost everything except the end.
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[Napier]

Scheme, I’d have to say. Similar to the posting about lisp. Scheme is written almost entirely in parentheses, which good Scheme programmers learn to ignore. It was developed to generate Fibonacci sequences, but since every single Scheme book or tutorial ever conceived uses Fibonacci sequence generation as a teaching example, there’s really no point in learning it.

[kferr]

I find C++ ugly to look at. I also find die-hard C++ programmers odd. A few years ago I went to an ACCU seminar and sat in on some C++ sessions and Java sessions. The C++ sessions were all about making the language jump thru some esoteric hoops. The Java sessions were about solving some type of real world problem.

Python also deserves a slap for its use of whitespace.

[cmkeller]

COBOL for me. I can’t bear writing “ADD X TO Y GIVING Z” when there’s actual math to be done. I’m hearing a lot of C bashing in this thread, but I thank heaven for C and its descendants.

[robert_columbia]

@Rysto

…

Honourable mention to C++, which was a wonderful idea in theory that was botched in basically every way possible in implementation. Bjarne Stroustrup should be tried for crimes against formal language theory.

C++ : Where only your friends can touch your private parts.

[That_Don_Guy]

@TriPolar

Cobol. Need I say more?

Yes. Line-Number Cobol. (The DEC implementation for VAX doesn’t require that every line have a number, which is a slight improvement.)

A close second is PDP Basic - not only was it another line-number language, but if you wanted to copy a string variable to another string variable, you couldn’t use:
A$ = B$
but, instead,
A$ = B$ + “”
because the first actually copied the pointer, so if you subsequently changed the contents of A$, you changed the contents of B$ to match.