What is the worst programming language you ever worked with

Question

If you have an interesting story to   share  please post an answer  but   do not abuse this question for bashing   a language      We are programmers  and our primary tool is the programming language we use   While there is a lot of discussion about the best one  I d like to hear your stories about the worst programming languages you ever worked with and I d like to know exactly what annoyed you   I d like to collect this stories partly to avoid common pitfalls while designing a language  especially a DSL  and partly to avoid quirky languages in the future in general     This question is not subjective  If a language supports only single character identifiers  see my own answer  this is bad in a non-debatable way      EDIT  Some people have raised concerns that this question attracts trolls  Wading through all your answers made one thing clear  The large majority of answers is appropriate  useful and well written   UPDATE 2009-07-01 19 15 GMT  The language overview is now complete  covering 103 different languages from 102 answers  I decided to be lax about what counts as a programming language and included anything reasonable  Thank you David for your comments on this    Here are all programming languages covered so far  alphabetical order  linked with answer  new entries in bold    ABAP  all 20th century languages  all drag and drop languages  all proprietary languages  APF  APL  1   AS400  Authorware  Autohotkey  BancaStar  BASIC  Bourne Shell  Brainfuck  C    Centura Team Developer  Cobol  1   Cold Fusion  Coldfusion  CRM114  Crystal Syntax  CSS  Dataflex 2 3  DB c DX  dbase II  DCL  Delphi IDE  Doors DXL  DOS batch  1   Excel Macro language  FileMaker  FOCUS  Forth  FORTRAN  FORTRAN 77  HTML  Illustra web blade  Informix 4th Generation Language  Informix Universal Server web blade  INTERCAL  Java  JavaScript  1   JCL  1   karol  LabTalk  Labview  Lingo  LISP  Logo  LOLCODE  LotusScript  m4  Magic II  Makefiles  MapBasic  MaxScript  Meditech Magic  MEL  mIRC Script  MS Access  MUMPS  Oberon  object extensions to C  Objective-C  OPS5  Oz  Perl  1   PHP  PL SQL  PowerDynamo  PROGRESS 4GL  prova  PS-FOCUS  Python  Regular Expressions  RPG  RPG II  Scheme  ScriptMaker  sendmail conf  Smalltalk  Smalltalk   SNOBOL  SpeedScript  Sybase PowerBuilder  Symbian C    System RPL  TCL  TECO  The Visual Software Environment  Tiny praat  TransCAD  troff  uBasic  VB6  1   VBScript  1   VDF4  Vimscript  Visual Basic  1   Visual C    Visual Foxpro  VSE  Webspeed  XSLT  The answers covering 80386 assembler  VB6 and VBScript have been removed

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I m surprised that no one has mentioned INTERCAL  The Compiler Language with No Pronouncable Acronym  It doesn t have a goto statement  It has a come from statement    Ok  seriously though  my two candidates are VB  and the combination of HTML  PHP and Javascript I have to work with   VB because it has 5 different loop constructs  for  while do  and do while I understand  But do you really also need until do and do until    Really   HTML PHP Javascript not because of any specific feature of any of the languages  but because you can intersperse them in very very confusing ways  Opening an HTML tag  having some Javascript in there  and in the middle  starting a PHP if  closing the javascript and HTML tag  and then later closing the PHP  and having another close of the HTML and JS     It ends up looking like                   It might seem as though that s just bad code  but I haven t yet figured out another way to do what we re doing that way

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If we ask ourselves this question X years down the line  X   10 or 20 or     we would all say in chorus that  all the languages of the 20th century sucked   Such would be the paradigm shift that we would be doing things in a much different way     though I cant visualize how

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The old Excel macro-language It was really frustrating to store variables in an excel sheet  VBA was also pretty bad

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Without a doubt  it was SmallTalk  But only on a technicality  the actual language was fine  but the IDE we used for it for class was VisualWorks  which is singly the worst IDE for anything I have ever experienced  Here s a few examples of the horrors   -You can t save the image  which is your whole project wrapped into a single file  unless every bit of code is completely syntactically and semantically correct -It crashes often  and the UI is horribly designed  Buttons would be drawn off the window and such  -One time VisualWorks froze on me after I had done about 2-3 hours of fresh work  unfortunately without saving  Luckily  I thought   the save button still worked  So  with a sigh of relief  I saved my project  But  because of VisualWorks method of saving your project as an image  when I reopened my file  it saved my project in the frozen state  I ended up having to go back to an earlier version of my code and losing a couple hours of work   And the single worst symptom of horrible IDE design  -There is only a single step of undo  And NOT ONLY THAT  Hear this  If you delete a line of code  move the cursor somewhere else  and then hit  undo   it will paste the line of code where the cursor presently is  not where the line originally was  WTF is that   I think freakin  LOTUS 1-2-3 had better undo capabilities than that   P S  I know I m not talking about the language  but since this represented my experience working with the language  I felt I could still reasonably give my answer in this thread

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The worse language I ve ever seen come from the tool praat  which is a good audio analysis tool  It does a pretty good job until you use the script language  sigh bad memories   Tiny praat script tutorial for beginners       Function call     We ve listed at least 3 different function calling syntax                The regular one         string   selected  Strings           Nothing special here  you assign to the variable string the result of the selected function  Not really scary    yet                   The  I m invoking some GUI command with parameters          Create Strings as file list    liste  path    type           As you can see  the function name start at  Create  and finish with the        The command  Create Strings as file list  is the text displayed on a button or a menu  I m to scared to check  on praat  This command take 2 parameters liste and an expression  I m going to look deeper in the expression  path    type            Hmm  Yep  No spaces  If spaces were introduced  it would be separate arguments  As you can imagine  parenthesis don t work  At this point of the description I would like to point out the suffix of the variable names  I won t develop it in this paragraph  I m just teasing                   The  Oh  but I want to get the result of the GUI command in my variable          noliftt   Get number of strings         Yes we can see a pattern here  long and weird function name  it must be a GUI calling  But there s no       so no parameters  I don t want to see what the parser looks like                         The incredible type system  AKA Haskell and OCaml  praat is coming to you               Simple natives types         windowname    left  line  length line  -4          So  what s going on there          It s now time to look at the convention and types of expression  so here we got                        left      String  Int  -  String             lenght     String  -  Int              windowname     String              line     String                   As you can see  variable name and function names are suffixed with their type or return type  If their suffix is a      then it return a string or is a string  If there is nothing it s a number  I can see the point of prefixing the type to a variable to ease implementation  but to suffix  no sorry  I can t                  Array type         To show the array type  let me introduce a  tiny  loop                for i from 1 to 4      nbsp  nbsp  nbsp  nbsp Select    time time      nbsp  nbsp  nbsp  nbsp bandwidth i     Get bandwidth    i      nbsp  nbsp  nbsp  nbsp forhertz i     Get formant    i     endfor                       We got i which is a number and     no it s not a function          bandwidth i           What it does is create string variables   bandwidth1   bandwidth2   bandwidth3   bandwidth4  and give them values  As you can expect  you can t create two dimensional array this way  you must do something like that           band2D   i    j                     http   img214 imageshack us img214 3008 scaredkittylolqa2 jpg                  The special string invocation                      outline      time  F i   forhertznum Hz  bandnum Hz   spec  newline                outline      outfile                                 Strings are weirdly  at least  handled in the language  the    is used to call the value of a variable inside the global    string  This is weird  It goes against all the convention built into many languages from bash to PHP passing by the powershell  And look  it even got redirection  Don t be fooled  it doesn t work like in your beloved shell  No you have to get the variable value with the                              Da Wonderderderfulful execution model         I m going to put the final touch to this wonderderderfulful presentation by talking to you about the execution model  So as in every procedural languages you got instruction executed from top to bottom  there is the variables and the praat GUI  That is you code everything on the praat gui  you invoke commands written on menu buttons          The main window of praat contain a list of items which can be                        files             list of files  created by a function with a wonderderfulful long long name              Spectrogramm             Strings  don t ask                   So if you want to perform operation on a given file  you must select the file in the list programmatically and then push the different buttons to take some actions  If you wanted to pass parameters to a GUI action  you have to follow the GUI layout of the form for your arguments  for example  To Spectrogram    0 005 5000 0 002 20 Gaussian   is like that because it follows this layout  http   img7 imageshack us img7 5534 tospectrogramm png              Needless to say  my nightmares are filled with praat scripts dancing around me and shouting  DEBUG MEEEE       More information at the praat site  under the well-named section  easy programmable scripting language

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Cold Fusion  I guess it s good for designers but as a programmer I always felt like one hand was tied behind my back

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Smalltalk   I had to learn it at the university  Hated every aspect of the language  Maybe our professors just made a dumb choice on the language implementation  but basically it worked like this    There was no sourcecode you could browse  There was just a class-tree where you could create and edit the method implementations  No way to save the code other than to cut n paste them to a notepad  You could save sessions  but these are binary dumps   The entire environment has been written in Smalltalk  and boy - was it slow  You could see the entire screen repaint every time you hit a key  The editor  that you had to use due to lack of load save sourcecode  lacked basic edit-features like insert override mode  The language was pure in a way that it wasn t possible to terminate a loop early  All things that made programming easy and efficient are forbidden in the language  Everything was an object  Override the comparison operator of a boolean and the entire system crashed

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Anyone mentioned the script language used in Autohotkey   Worst language I ever used

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Nobody said AS400       I had that at university  and it was definitely the worst

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RPG II   anyone   It was among the worst checkthis Wiki description for a brief intro to a language that lived long past its expire by date   On the bright side you could write programs drunk or sober and it didn t make much difference

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A half-baked object orientated extension to C  In embedded systems there is still a lot of C only projects  So every now and then somebody thinks his object orientated solution is all that is required to whip this project into shape     leaving a massive maintenance mess somewhere down the line   Usually the person starts out with modest and noble aims but it just gets away from him  every time  He hands over to a different programmer that thinks this great  OOP in C  how neat and then butchers the already tragic code he does not understands  Soon it is beyond any repair  The worst one I have seen no driver could compile without including all the headers of the objects that is going to use it as well as the header files for that component user up to the highest level   Any programming language will become a monster if it is not used as intended

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My answer is fairly borderline but I think it s worth putting on the record   HTML  Not a particularly powerful language by any means but given the number of people who have more than a passing familiarity with it and would classify themselves as programmers I think it should qualify   A lot of the angst  in this thread even  directed at languages such as PHP has its roots in the limitations of HTML  Consider a few of its low-points  it encourages the mixing of content and presentation  it is verbose and repetative  the spec still has areas of ambiguity  and  tellingly  implementations have traditionally suffered from a lack of conformance to the spec  The grand ecosystem of client and server side languages owe a lot to the fact that straight HTML is a pain   Yes  there are bad quirky languages  but pushing a common language beyond its limits is a greater evil in my book

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Worst Programming Language  -  Brainfuck  I haven t worked with it myself  but I would call it the worst   It s generally used as a challenge though  not for production  more like  I m bored this weekend  let s see if I can re-write tic tac toe in it    Check out it s Hello World program on wiki

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JCL - Job Control Language for IBM Mainframes    not quite a programming language  more a batch file thing   This was based on the punch card which would normally be placed at the start of jobs  i e  Same syntax  different medium  The 71 column limit and fact that the cards cost money meant verbosity was a sin best left to COBOL source  This attitude carried over to JCL  the non paper counterpart   I just about figured out how to change the job queue and parameters in the lead card during my time working with it  Wikipedia provides the following fine example     IS198CPY JOB  IS198T30500   COPY JOB  CLASS L MSGCLASS X   COPY01   EXEC PGM IEBGENER   SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT     SYSUT1   DD DSN OLDFILE DISP SHR   SYSUT2   DD DSN NEWFILE                DISP  NEW CATLG DELETE                 SPACE  CYL  40 5  RLSE                 DCB  LRECL 115 BLKSIZE 1150    SYSIN    DD DUMMY   Precisely   Honourable mention must go to Cincom Mantis  an  application generator   read  text-based form designer   powered  by a COBOL-like 4GL  Mantis is the language which helped me decide to go get a degree - the last of several CICS in the ass     edit Mentions of DCL and the like elsewhere    Datatrieve I also remember  These were indeed awful  but still preferred the VMS stuff to anything mainframe

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FOCUS  touted as a  4GL   fourth generation language    Some systems could use FOCUS like SQL  doing db queries  the results of which were wrapped in BASIC or some other procedural language  but the system I worked on at Boeing in the 80s didn t have that   Kind of like a very poor excel to run a business enterprise   That was the only programming job I hated

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Visual Foxpro

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CRM114   A language specifically designed for interfacing with a very powerful Bayesian filter  useful for spam-filtering and similar tasks   I was asked to use it by a client last year and after looking into it  used some simple Bayesian code off of Codeproject com instead   Later  I found a message posted on a forum somewhere from the original author of CRM114  apologizing for it    The main problem was Latin-derived grammar   The author admitted that he d been learning Latin at the time  and so integrated it into his project   Thus  it gets strange operator-order and argument conventions   This also led to using the word  alius   Latin for  otherwise  or  else  where you d use  else  in any other language   Very difficult to make it do anything at all

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maybe FORTRAN     I m still havinh incubius of it

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The  bat files scripting language on DOS Windows  God only knows how un-powerful is this one  specially if you compare it to the Unix shell languages  that aren t so powerful either  but way better nonetheless    Just try to concatenate two strings or make a for loop  Nah

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Regular expressions  It s a write only language  and it s hard to verify if it works correctly for the right inputs

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Not sure if its a true language  but I hate Makefiles   Makefiles have meaningful differences between space and TAB  so even if two lines appear identical  they do not run the same   Make also relies on a complex set of implicit rules for many languages  which are difficult to learn  but then are frequently overridden by the make file   A Makefile system is typically spread over many  many files  across many directories  With virtually no scoping or abstraction  a change to a make file several directories away can prevent my source from building   Yet the error message is invariably a compliation error  not a meaningful error about make  or the makefiles   Any environment I ve worked in that uses makefiles successfully has a full-time Make expert   And all this to shave a few minutes off compilation

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troff   Tells you how old I am  You could do pretty sweet things in it  but it was rough  You guys that think Perl is unreadable should check it out   I mean    nr  pop-count 0  while     n  z              warning automatically terminating diversion   n  z     ie d  div-end   n  z   div-end   n  z     el   div-end-default     nr  pop-count  1        ensure that we don t loop forever     if   n  pop-count  gt 20   fatal recovery failed      while     n  ev  0   ev  par reset-env  par reset   And believe it or not  after having to do this for years  I stayed with programming

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LabVIEW  is that even considered a language    It was horrible  If you want to broaden the term  HTML sucks too  as does XML

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I m going to vote for ColdFusion   It s trying to be a cool scripting language  but being done up in html-like tags was driving me nuts - it s been a little while since I had to deal with it  but as I remember variable declarations could be a bear  and it was easy to have slightly different versions of the server on two different environments which would have code working differently on both   If you wanted to do anything really impressive with it  it basically involved creating an object in Java and figuring out how to link it in with coldfusion s server so you could invoke it as a tag   I m working in PHP  and even though PHP has it s problems  ColdFusion was definately worse

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SNOBOL had some neat features  and string processing abilities more extensive than Perl s   It also had one type of statement    lt base string gt   lt match string gt     lt replacement string gt   S  lt label gt    F  lt label gt   where most of the components could be omitted   Control structures were done by jumping to one label or another  if present  depending on whether the match string could be found in the base string   The strings could include assorted functions and substrings  so a reasonable SNOBOL string could include all the syntax trees mentioned in the back of your favorite programming language standard   It was trivial to write a parser in it  although it wouldn t necessarily be at all efficient   but anything like arithmetic or loops were pains

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PC-FOCUS  I worked on a warehouse inventory   management system where the back office subsystem was implemented in PC-FOCUS   All that needs to be said about this language is that there was a 100  page chapter in the programming manual titled  Workarounds

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I was going to bitch and moan about Java  but obviously it isn t THAT bad and that would have amounted to trolling  and besides  I just remembered something far worse   Magic II   It just barely qualified as a language  Really  it could be more accurately described as a pre-SQL database system with a data driven programming model  It was based on the astute observation that almost everything you ever do with database tables involves doing something before you start iterating on the data  then iterating on the data  and then maybe doing something after you re done     Programming  Magic involves filling in fields in tables that describe those three phases of a program s life  It also had a text mode screen designer that tied in with this whole mess  A trained Magic user could knock out reports and data entry screens at a reasonably fast pace  which made management happy   The problem for me was that the language had very minimal abstraction facilities  You could define routines that you could call from other routines  That s it  No data structures other than database tables  no in-memory arrays  you could define new tables  though     No hash tables  no way to organize variables  which the language did support  in any meaningful way  No lists  Nothing  Of course  no classes or anything resembling an object model  but honestly - I could live without that  And I did   Worse yet  the  program  had bits and pieces that were hidden away in fields that you had to zoom into to be able to see - certain expressions  etc  So you could never just read a screen of code and know what it did    This thing took data driven programming to its ultimate  sad apex  It s an obsession  manifested in a programming tool  I was glad to put that miserable piece of junk behind me   Recently  I met a former co-worker who worked with me while I was using Magic  It s been almost 20 years since I ve done that  but she was all too happy to tell me how she was tasked with maintaining one of my projects  and that she declared defeat when she found a recursive procedure in there somewhere  She had never seen anyone implement recursion in Magic  No one ever has  It was uncharted territory  I don t think anyone realized the tool was capable of recursion   The project had to be rewritten in a hurry  before it caused someone s brain to explode

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RPG Not talking about Role Playing Games here  fellas   I took COBOL in college  as well as RPG IV   If there is any language that makes me want to dig my eyeball out with a fork  it s RPG   It s pretty much  quot column-based quot  code  in that you don t just write your code from left to right  you have to make sure you are in the correct columns   The reasoning behind this is that the language was originally created for punch card development   I can t write to a file   What the heck  Well duh  dummy  you forgot a capital F in column 68

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For me the worst experience which tainted my view of the language was Perl   I was asked to support a bunch of perl scripts that have been  supported  by other people who promptly left the company few months after being asked to support it   While the language may be ok  it allows the code to become unreadable and almost unsupportable very quickly  unless only 1 person ever touches them    It was a mess of regexp  pseudo objects  single letter variables and function names   It quickly led me to rewrite it all in python and scrap perl completely  it was that or me quitting    The python version was so much more usable and supportable that 10 years later it is still in use and from what I hear no one is allowed to use Perl at that company again

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I haven t yet worked with many languages and deal mostly with scripting languages  out of these VBScript is the one I like least  Although it has some handy features  some things really piss me off    Object assignments are made using the Set keyword   Set foo   Nothing   Omitting Set is one of the most common causes of run-time errors  No such thing as structured exception handling  Error checking is like this   On Error Resume Next    Do something  If Err Number  lt  gt  0     Handle error   Err Clear End If    And so on  Enclosing the procedure call parameters in parentheses requires using the Call keyword   Call Foo  a  b   Its English-like syntax is way too verbose   I m a fan of curly braces   Logical operators are long-circuit  If you need to test a compound condition where the subsequent condition relies on the success of the previous one  you need to put conditions into separate If statements  Lack of parameterized class constructors  To wrap a statement into several lines  you have to use an underscore   str    Hello     amp           world    Lack of multiline comments      Edit  found this article  The Flangy Guide to Hating VBScript  The author sums up his complaints as  VBS isn t Python

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Nobody mentioned Vimscript yet   My Vim journey was like Coraline s journey into the other side of the door  It was so cool at first and my fingers were happy but then I didn t want to replace my eyes with VIMScript

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Twice I ve had to work in  languages  where you drag-n-dropped modules onto the page and linked them together with lines to show data flow   One claimed to be a RDBMs  and the other a general purpose data acquisition and number crunching language    Just thinking of it makes me what to throttle someone  Or puke  Or both   Worse  neither exposed a text language that you could hack directly

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I can t belive nobody has said this one   LotusScript  I thinks is far worst than php at least   Is not about the language itself which follows a syntax similar to Visual Basic  is the fact that it seem to have a lot of functions for extremely unuseful things that you will never  or one in a million times  use  but lack support for things you will use everyday   I don t remember any concrete example but they were like    Ok  I have an event to check whether the mouse pointer is in the upper corner of the form and I don t have an double click event for the Form     WTF

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I have given the same answer elsewhere  but I think it deserves its place here   In the late 90s I had to write several web sites in Informix Universal Server web blade  aka Illustra web blade   For anyone who doesn t know anything about this execrable environment  it forced you to use the most bizarre language I have ever come across  As Joel Spolsky described it     When it did run  it proved to have the only programming language I ve ever seen that wasn t Turing-equivalent  if you can imagine that     More on it here http   philip greenspun com wtr illustra-tips html  And an example of a  simple  if condition   cond   OR   NXST  email    NXST  name    NXST  subject     I wish I could find the full api document  as looking back now in hindsight it would be hilarious   unbelievable   tragic    One example of it s dire nature was the fact that it had no loops  Of any kind  It was possible to hack looping functionality by creating a query and iterating through its rows  but that is so wrong it makes me feel sick   edit  I ve managed to find a complete code sample  Behold    lt HTML gt   lt HEAD gt  lt TITLE gt WINSTART bug lt  TITLE gt  lt  HEAD gt   lt BODY gt   lt  --- Initialization --- gt   lt  MIVAR NAME WINSIZE DEFAULT 4 gt  WINSIZE lt   MIVAR gt   lt  MIVAR NAME BEGIN DEFAULT 1 gt  START lt   MIVAR gt    lt  --- Definition of Ranges ---- gt   lt  MIVAR NAME BEGIN gt   IF    lt   BEGIN 1  1  BEGIN  lt   MIVAR gt   lt  MIVAR NAME END gt      BEGIN  WINSIZE  lt   MIVAR gt   lt  --- Execution --- gt   lt TABLE BORDER gt   lt  MISQL WINSTART  BEGIN WINSIZE  WINSIZE     SQL  select tabname from systables where tabname like  web            order by tabname   gt       lt TR gt  lt TD gt  1 lt  TD gt  lt  TR gt   lt   MISQL gt   lt  TABLE gt   lt BR gt   lt  MIBLOCK COND     gt   BEGIN 1   gt       lt  MIVAR gt       lt A HREF  WEB HOME MIval WINWALK amp START   -  BEGIN  WINSIZE  amp WINSIZE  WINSIZE gt      Previous  WINSIZE Rows  lt  A gt    IF    lt   MI ROWCOUNT  WINSIZE   No More Rows          lt   MIVAR gt   lt   MIBLOCK gt   lt  MIBLOCK COND    AND    gt   END  WINSIZE     gt    MI ROWCOUNT  WINSIZE    gt       lt  MIVAR gt       lt A HREF  WEB HOME MIval WINWALK amp START  END amp WINSIZE  WINSIZE gt      Next  WINSIZE Rows   lt  A gt       lt   MIVAR gt   lt   MIBLOCK gt   lt  BODY gt      Prettify doesn t know how to colour it  quelle surprise

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VSE  The Visual Software Environment   This is a language that a prof of mine  Dr  Henry Ledgard  tried to sell us on back in undergrad grad school    I don t feel bad about giving his name because  as far as I can tell  he s still a big proponent and would welcome the chance to convince some folks it s the best thing since sliced bread    When describing it to people  my best analogy is that it s sort of a bastard child of FORTRAN and COBOL  with some extra bad thrown in   From the only really accessible folder I ve found with this material  there s lots more in there that I m not going to link specifically here     VSE Overview  pdf  Chapter 3  The VSE Language  pdf   Not really an overview of the language at all  Appendix  On Strings and Characters  pdf  The Software Survivors  pdf   Fevered ramblings attempting to justify this turd    VSE is built around what they call  The Separation Principle    The idea is that Data and Behavior must be completely segregated   Imagine C s requirement that all variables data must be declared at the beginning of the function  except now move that declaration into a separate file that other functions can use as well   When other functions use it  they re using the same data  not a local copy of data with the same layout   Why do things this way   We learn that from The Software Survivors that Variable Scope Rules Are Hard   I d include a quote but  like most fools  it takes these guys forever to say anything   Search that PDF for  Quagmire Of Scope  and you ll discover some true enlightenment   They go on to claim that this somehow makes it more suitable for multi-proc environments because it more closely models the underlying hardware implementation   Riiiight   Another choice theme that comes up frequently    INCREMENT DAY COUNT BY 7  or DAY COUNT   DAY COUNT   7  DECREMENT TOTAL LOSS BY GROUND LOSS ADD 100 3 TO TOTAL LOSS LINK POINTER  SET AIRCRAFT STATE TO ON THE GROUND PERCENT BUSY    TOTAL BUSY CALLS   100  TOTAL CALLS       Although not earthshaking  the style   of arithmetic reflects ordinary usage    i e   anyone can read and understand   it - without knowing a programming   language  In fact  VisiSoft arithmetic   is virtually identical to FORTRAN    including embedded complex arithmetic    This puts programmers concerned with   their professional status and   corresponding job security ill at   ease    Ummm  not that concerned at all  really   One of the key selling points that Bill Cave uses to try to sell VSE is the democratization of programming so that business people don t need to indenture themselves to programmers who use crazy  arcane tools for the sole purpose of job security   He leverages this irrational fear to sell his tool    And it works-- the federal gov t is his biggest customer    I counted 17 uses of the phrase  job security  in the document   Examples             and fit only for those desiring artificial job security    More false job security    Is job security dependent upon ensuring the other guy can t figure out what was done    Is job security dependent upon complex code       One of the strongest forces affecting the acceptance of new technology is the perception of one s job security       He uses this paranoia to drive wedge between the managers holding the purse strings and the technical people who have the knowledge to recognize VSE for the turd that it is   This is how he squeezes it into companies--  Your technical people are only saying it sucks because they re afraid it will make them obsolete      A few additional choice quotes from the overview documentation      Another consequence of this approach   is that data is mapped into memory   on a  What You See Is What You Get    basis  and maintained throughout     This allows users to move a complete   structure as a string of characters   into a template that descrives each   individual field   Multiple templates   can be redefined for a given storage   area   Unlike C and other languages    substructures can be moved without the problems of misalignment due to   word boundary alignment standards    Now  I don t know about you  but I know that a WYSIWYG approach to memory layout is at the top of my priority list when it comes to language choice   Basically  they ignore alignment issues because only old languages that were designed in the  60 s and  70 s care about word alignment   Or something like that   The reasoning is bogus   It made so little sense to me that I proceeded to forget it almost immediately        There are no user-defined types in VSE   This is a far-reaching   decision that greatly simplifies the   language   The gain from a practical   point of view is also great   VSE   allows the designer and programmer to   organize a program along the same   lines as a physical system being   modeled   VSE allows structures to be   built in an easy-to-read  logical   attribute hierarchy    Awesome   User-defined types are lame   Why would I want something like an InputMessage object when I can have   LINKS IN USE INTEGER INPUT MESSAGE    1 ORIGIN             INTEGER    1 DESTINATION        INTEGER    1 MESSAGE       2 MESSAGE HEADER  CHAR 10       2 MESSAGE BODY    CHAR 24       2 MESSAGE TRAILER CHAR 10    1 ARRIVAL TIME       INTEGER    1 DURATION           INTEGER    1 TYPE               CHAR 5  OUTPUT MESSAGE CHARACTER 50   You might look at that and think   Oh  that s pretty nicely formatted  if a bit old-school    Old-school is right   Whitespace is significant-- very significant   And redundant   The 1 s must be in column 3   The 1 indicates that it s at the first level of the hierarchy   The Symbol name must be in column 5   You hierarchies are limited to a depth of 9   Well  ok  but is that so awful   Just wait      It is well known that for reading   text  use of conventional upper lower   case is more readable  VSE uses all   upper case  except for comments   Why    The literature in psychology is based   on prose  Programs  simply  are not   prose  Programs are more like math    accounting  tables  Program fonts    usually Courier  are almost   universally fixed-pitch  and for good   reason     vertical alignment among   related lines of code  Programs in   upper case are nicely readable  and    after a time  much better in our   opinion   Nothing like enforcing your opinion at the language level   That s right  you cannot use any lower case in VSE unless it s in a comment   Just keep your CAPSLOCK on  it s gonna be stuck there for a while     VSE subprocedures are called processes   This code sample contains three processes   PROCESS MUSIC     EXECUTE INITIALIZE THE SCENE     EXECUTE PROCESS PANEL WIDGET  INITIALIZE THE SCENE     SET TEST BUTTON PANEL BUTTON STATUS TO ON     MOVE     TO TEST INPUT PANEL INPUT TEXT     DISPLAY PANEL PANEL MUSIC  PROCESS PANEL WIDGET     ACCEPT PANEL PANEL MUSIC      CHECK FOR BUTTON CLICK     IF RTG PANEL WIDGET NAME IS EQUAL TO  TEST BUTTON         MOVE  I LIKE THE BEATLES   TO TEST INPUT PANEL INPUT TEXT      DISPLAY PANEL PANEL MUSIC   All caps as expected   After all  that s easier to read   Note the whitespace   It s significant again   All process names must start in column 0   The initial level of instructions must start on column 4   Deeper levels must be indented exactly 3 spaces   This isn t a big deal  though  because you aren t allowed to do things like nest conditionals   You want a nested conditional   Well just make another process and call it   And note the delicious COBOL-esque syntax     You want loops   Easy   EXECUTE NEXT CALL EXECUTE NEXT CALL 5 TIMES EXECUTE NEXT CALL TOTAL CALL TIMES  EXECUTE NEXT CALL    UNTIL NO LINES ARE AVAILABLE EXECUTE NEXT CALL    UNTIL CALLS ANSWERED ARE EQUAL TO CALLS WAITING EXECUTE READ MESSAGE UNTIL LEAD CHARACTER IS A DELIMITER   Ugh

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Good God  you mean no one has used PL SQL    The spawn from the hell that is Oracle is interpreted  and lives in the context of the Oracle Server    All output is spooled  until the program is done   There is an absolute limit on the amount of output that it can display  It is nearly impossible to debug   Ga     I feel I ll just thinking about it

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ABAP  It s used to program applications for SAP  And it s bad

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I4GL  Informix 4th Generation Language    Thankfully  it s pretty much dead  The language was not hard to look at or write  but implementation flaws made it nearly useless   First of all  it was really two languages- the interpreted  more flexible  slow  and the compiled  nearly useless  the one that actually finished running in your lifetime   Proprietary  of course   Early versions lacked some arithmetic operators  so you had to push temporary data into the database and use SQL for math   It was supposed to have multi-user capabilities  but since the backend  Informix Turbo  remember that   lacked proper locking  instead of a 90 second wait on a locked row followed by a useful error return  you would get an instant return with a non-usable non-error return value  Since I4GL was useless without the backend  I consider that a flaw in the language runtime   I once had a job hacking all the previous programmer s Unions into series of smaller selects in I4GL loops  The reason  the unions would not complete in your lifetime  Of course  the project manager had removed the index Unique constraints  since they made the inserts crash so much

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There are just two kinds of languages  the ones everybody complains about and the ones nobody uses    Bjarne Stroustrup

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I find myself avoid having to use VBScript Visual Basic 6 the most   I use primarily C    javascript  Java for most tasks and dabble in ruby  scala  erlang  python  assembler  perl when the need arises   I  like most other reasonably minded polyglots programmers  strongly feel that you have to use the right tool for the job - this requires you to understand your domain and to understand your tools   My issue with VBscript and VB6 is when I use them to script windows or office applications  the right domain for them  - i find myself struggling with the language  they fall short of being the right tool    VBScript s lack of easy to use native data structures  such as associative containers maps  and other quirks  such as set for assignment to objects  is a needless and frustrating annoyance  especially for a scripting language   Contrast it with Javascript  which i now use to program wscript cscript windows and do activex automation scripts  which is far more expressive   While there are certain things that work better with vbscript  such as passing arrays back and forth from COM objects is slightly easier  although it is easier to pass event handlers into COM components with jscript   I am still surprised by the amount of coders that still use vbscript to script windows - I bet if they wrote the same program in both languages they would find that jscript works with you much more than vbscript  because of jscript s native hash data types and closures   Vb6 VBA  though a little better than vbscript in general  still has many similar issues where  for their domain  they require much more boiler plate to do simple tasks than what I would like and have seen in other scripting languages

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DOS Batch files  Not sure if this qualifies as programming language at all  It s not that you can t solve your problems  but if you are used to bash     Just my two cents

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I m not sure if you meant to include scripting languages  but I ve seen TCL  which is also annoying   but    the mIRC scripting language annoys me to no end   Because of some oversight in the parsing  it s whitespace significant when it s not supposed to be  Conditional statements will sometimes be executed when they re supposed to be skipped because of this  Opening a block statement cannot be done on a separate line  etc   Other than that it s just full of messy  inconsistent syntax that was probably designed that way to make very basic stuff easy  but at the same time makes anything a little more complex barely readable   I lost most of my mIRC scripts  or I could have probably found some good examples of what a horrible mess it forces you to create

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I also forgot to mention prova and yes  it is a mixed language  It is a prolog implementation built on top of java which means that it is damn slow  They sell it by its ability to call java functions  the sad part is that you lose backtracking when you do it  So  all in all  you lose the strengths of both languages  I still don t understand why the authors didn t choose just an implementation of prolog inside java  so you can call prolog code from java instead of build your own interpreter

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Its VB6 NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO                                You end up like Winston Smith in the ending of 1984

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In terms of languages I ve come across  I ll vote for COBOL and Scheme   COBOL was definitive proof that business majors should never write a programming language  and this is coming from a business major graduate -- CIS    You should not be able to write semi-coherent novels and have it compile into something   I know that it had its use 40 years ago  but someone ported it to COBOL NET  for crying out loud   Second place would be Scheme  which had exactly one variable type  the linked list   Trying to learn how to think in it is like trying to learn how to think like a polar bear if you re an American-born Martian   It s totally alien to everything else   In terms of languages I ve used professionally  VBScript hands down   It s like VB only worse   I once tried to implement the MD5 algorithm in VBScript   The first thing I had to do was implement freaking bit-shifting operations   Rather than reinventing the wheel  I went out and looked for an implementation   The one I found  I kid you not  followed the following algorithm    Convert your number to hex Convert your hex to a string  e g   0x08 -   08  Using a giant select case statement  convert each digit to a string of 1s and 0s  e g    8  -   00001000  Now that you have a giant string of 1s and 0s  shift them around as necessary   It was a total mess   And it was the best one I found    Caveat  That s the algorithm as best I remember it   It was 6 years ago

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Visual Basic  I simply fail to understand its cryptic syntax  since it doesn t follow any programming convention  As a guy used to the syntax of C C   I may be partial though  But that doesn t undermine the fact that VB is THE worst language I ve worked with

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I think MaxScript  the scripting language which comes with 3d studio MAX  I never could see any logic to its syntax

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LISP  Maybe there is nothing wrong with the language but it is just beyond me

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METLIFE ENGLISH LANGUAGE  MEL    I worked for a company that wrote tools to automatically find and fix Y2K problems in Cobol and PL I   MetLife approached us with 2m lines of code they d written in MEL  a language they developed in the late 50 s or early 60 s   MEL was a language that helped inspire Cobol  and its procedural code would look reasonably familiar to any modern Cobol programmer   We had a strong developer take a crack at writing a translator to rip through MEL programs and correct identified dates   He actually got a demo going in a couple weeks  and he thought that another 3-4 weeks of work were all that would be needed to get it into shape for production   Great  we thought  and decided to take on the work   Unfortunately  he hadn t really studied MEL s very primitive equivalent of the Cobol DATA DIVISION  where declarations go    It turned out each MEL program provided its own view of each input or output file  and it only declared those fields it was interested in   There might be 30 or 40 different takes on what an input file with variant records looked like  Talk about blind men and the elephant   An exceptionally bright and driven guy then took over and worked out the semantics of identifying which record definitions described what file  a process made much harder by the presence of variant records in many files   He then wrote the algorighms to unify each set of alternate record definitions into a common record definition  and then mapping everything from old emulated Honeywell data types into new IBM mainframe types   It took two person years to get it all working

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Dataflex 2 3 and VDF4   VDF 4 is what drove me away from Dataflex     One of the most stupid things they did was use the Windows message for the third mouse button to communicate between the IDE and the complier   It worked fine unless you had a 3 button mouse

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Logo   that damn turtle would never go where I wanted it to

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OPS5  Even thinking about it now makes me openly weep

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PROGRESS 4GL  apparently now known as  OpenEdge Advanced Business Language     PROGRESS is both a language and a database system  The whole language is designed to make it easy to write crappy green-screen data-entry screens   So start by imagining how well this translates to Windows   Anything fancier than that  whether pretty screens  program logic  or batch processing    not so much   I last used version 7  back in the late  90s  so it s vaguely possible that some of this is out-of-date  but I wouldn t bet on it    It was originally designed for text-mode data-entry screens  so on Windows  all screen coordinates are in  character  units  which are some weird number of pixels wide and a different number of pixels high  But of course they default to a proportional font  so the number of  character units  doesn t correspond to the actual number of characters that will fit in a given space  No classes or objects  No language support for arrays or dynamic memory allocation  If you want something resembling an array  you create a temporary in-memory database table  define its schema  and then get a cursor on it   I saw a bit of code from a later version  where they actually built and shipped a primitive object-oriented system on top of these in-memory tables  Scary   ISAM database access is built in   But not SQL  Who needs it   If you want to increment the Counter field in the current record in the State table  you just say State Counter   State Counter   1  Which isn t so bad  except    When you use a table directly in code  then behind the scenes  they create something resembling an invisible  magic local variable to hold the current cursor position in that table  They guess at which containing block this cursor will be scoped to  If you re not careful  your cursor will vanish when you exit a block  and reset itself later  with no warning  Or you ll start working with a table and find that you re not starting at the first record  because you re reusing the cursor from some other block  or even your own  because your scope was expanded when you didn t expect it   Transactions operate on these wild-guess scopes  Are we having fun yet  Everything can be abbreviated  For some of the offensively long keywords  this might not seem so bad at first  But if you have a variable named Index  you can refer to it as Index or as Ind or even as I   Typos can have very interesting results   And if you want to access a database field  not only can you abbreviate the field name  but you don t even have to qualify it with the table name  they ll guess the table too  For truly frightening results  combine this with  Unless otherwise specified  they assume everything is a database access  If you access a variable you haven t declared yet  or  more likely  if you mistype the variable name   there s no compiler error  instead  it goes looking for a database field with that name    or a field that abbreviates to that name    The guessing is the worst  Between the abbreviations and the field-by-default  you could get some nasty stuff if you weren t careful   Forgot to declare I as a local variable before using it as a loop variable  No problem  we ll just randomly pick a table  grab its current record  and completely trash an arbitrarily-chosen field whose name starts with I    Then add in the fact that an accidental field-by-default access could change the scope it guessed for your tables  thus breaking some completely unrelated piece of code  Fun  yes   They also have a reporting system built into the language  but I have apparently repressed all memories of it   When I got another job working with Netscape LiveWire  an ill-fated attempt at server-side JavaScript  and classic ASP  VBScript   I was in heaven

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In 25  years of computer programming  by far the worst thing I ve ever experienced was a derivative of MUMPS called Meditech Magic   It s much more evil than PHP could ever hope to be     It doesn t even use     for assignment   100 b assigns a value of 100 to b and is read as  100 goes to b    Basically  this language invented its own syntax from top to bottom   So no matter how many programming languages you know  Magic will be a complete mystery to you   Here is 100 bottles of beer on the wall written in this abomination of a language   BEERv1 1  100 b T       DO b  lt 1 NN b  bottle  IF b 1      s     of beer on the wall                                N b  bottle  IF b 1      s     of beer                                 N  You take one down  pass it around      b-1 b                            N b  bottle  IF b 1      s     of beer on the wall        END

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Oh  come on  In 3 pages  no mention of Forth   Seriously   Sure  like APL  it is powerful and it has its place   But like APL it competes for first place in the Write-Only Language category   I still curse the physics professor who forced this on me in the late 80s because he was convinced it was going to take over the software world   My heartfelt regrets to the 5 people in the universe who process reality in reverse polish notation   Or should I say something like  apology

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The worst two languages I ve worked with were APL  which is relatively well known for languages of its age  and TECO  the language in which the original Emacs was written   Both are notable for their terse  inscrutable syntax   APL is an array processing language  it s extremely  powerful  but nearly impossible to read  since every character is an operator  and many don t appear on standard keyboards   TECO had a similar look  and for a similar reason   Most characters are operators  and this special purpose language was devoted to editing text files   It was a little better  since it used the standard character set   And it did have the ability to define functions  which was what gave life to emacs--people wrote macros  and only invoked those after a while   But figuring out what a program did or writing a new one was quite a challenge

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Bourne Shell  I once was running a invoicing system for a telecom company  This meant manually running a bunch of commands that would each in order collect  prepare  calculate  format and finally print the invoice  This would typically be done in batch form  so that I was told which customer numbers to make invoices for and I d do them all in batch   This was boring  So I started automating it  Unfortunately  the only language allowed on the servers was     well none  At all  So I had to write everything in shell scripts  And that is a truly absurd and bizarre language  Nothing really much makes sense  It s inconsistent and overly sparse  so two similar things may do completely different things because a   comes in a slightly different place  And using backquotes as a part of a language is just pure evil  They don t even look different from single quotes in some fonts   I ve had way worse programming experiences  WAY worse  But those has always involved maintaining other peoples bizarre code  But this has to be the worst language I ve ever used  Worse than DOS Batch files  Oh yes  DOS Batch files main problem is that they are primitive  You have to find clever ways to make it actually do something useful  But the syntax itself isn t that bad  It just doesn t have enough built in functionality  Worse than Visual Basic  Oh yeah  without a doubt  although admittedly I wrote a UI to this Bourne Shell system in MS Access and that was almost as horrible  but just almost  And they communicated via Sybase  so I needed to learn Sybase SQL  which also is quite horrid  But still not nearly as horrid as sh-scripting   So Bourne Shell wins the jumbo price for me  Only just  with VB close on it heels  but it still wins

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The worst language  BancStar  hands down    3 000 predefined variables  all numbered  all global  No variable declaration  no initialization  Half of them  scattered over the range  reserved for system use  but you can use them at your peril  A hundred or so are automatically filled in as a result of various operations  and no list of which ones those are  They all fit in 38k bytes  and there is no protection whatsoever for buffer overflow  The system will cheerfully let users put 20 bytes in a ten byte field if you declared the length of an input field incorrectly  The effects are unpredictable  to say the least   This is a language that will let you declare a calculated gosub or goto  due to its limitations  this is frequently necessary  Conditionals can be declared forward or reverse  Picture an  If  statement that terminates 20 lines before it begins   The return stack is very shallow   20 Gosubs or so  and since a user s press of any function key kicks off a different subroutine  you can overrun the stack easily  The designers thoughtfully included a  Clear Gosubs  command to nuke the stack completely in order to fix that problem and to make sure you would never know exactly what the program would do next   There is much more  Tens of thousands of lines of this Lovecraftian horror

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CodeGear Delphi  Its really not the language I disliked  but the IDE  CodeGear RAD Studio for Delphi  This is easily the worst  most buggy  crash-happy IDE I ve ever used  Me and the other Delphi programmers would routinely lose hours of development time everyday because the IDE would crash or freeze   After we installed CodeRush  the application became virtually unsuable  It crashed in regular 5-15 minute intervals  even without user input  Even worse  mysterious errors were triggered by basic debugging  such as hitting a breakpoint  routinely  the debugger would hit a breakpoint and simply freeze in its tracks on a trivial line  like a variable assignment  Nothing you could do would make it proceed any further   If you left the program alone  it would sit stable for up to a half hours before throwing some kind of memory exception   So  after we d spent thousands of dollars on licenses CodeGear RAD Studio  no one wanted to use it  By the time I left the company  all of our Delphi projects were coded with VIM instead

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System RPL  used by HP 48  49 and 50 graphing scientific calculators  There were times it seemed to me that the compiler actually had produce a higher-level language for the processor to execute

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Oberon   In our first year at university  everyone had to program in Oberon  I think the idea was to make sure nobody had a head start  The language was tied to the Oberon OS GUI which was horrible  I m not sure if anything changed  but that was definitely my worst programming experience ever

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I despise proprietry languages like C  and AppleScript whose only reason for existing is to tie developers to a commercial platform or product  This isn t exactly a technical problem  but it is a social one when these languages are then taught in schools  I have a friend who only has Linux installed and he s being taught C  in 1st-Year CompSci  Yes there s Mono  but naturally it s always playing catch-up on features and stability

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In Unix  m4 scripts and sendmail conf

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XSLT    XSLT is baffling  to begin with  The metaphor is completely different from anything else I know    The thing was designed by a committee so deep in angle brackets that it comes off as a bizarre frankenstein  The weird incantations required to specify the output format  The built-in  invisible rules   The odd bolt-on stuff  like scripts  The dependency on XPath   The tools support has been pretty slim  until lately  Debugging XSLT in the early days was an exercise in navigating in complete darkness   The tools change that but  still XSLT tops my list    XSLT is weird enough that most people just ignore it   If you must use it  you need an XSLT Shaman to give you the magic incantations to make things go

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Visual C        So much legacy code interweaved     everywhere   Made me love Obj-C

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dBase II  that s 2  not 3    Fortunately I didn t use it a lot  and it s been over twenty years  so I don t remember much except the pain   IIRC  its liberal use of special characters in variable names  and other places   made it almost impossible to read  and it was lacking in flow control   It seemed that 3 got a lot more use  and already did when I was using 2  but my employer was too cheap to upgrade   but I don t know if it was any nicer

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Javascript before the existence of FireBug and coding it using a Notepad   It was the most horrible code in my life  JS was case sensitive and I had lot of headaches  IE detect errors in a weired way

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For my senior design  we programmed a Canon camera to produce depth maps using CHDK  Most of the code was written in C  but you have to interface to it with this ridiculous language called uBasic  Basically  it wasn t implemented with a proper parser  and so variables can only be 1 letter  it s insanely slow  and if you make a mistake  the camera just shuts off

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For me  the answer is Crystal Syntax  the BASIC-like language used by Crystal Reports  Trying to accomplish anything other than mere comparisons is difficult at best and impossible at worst  Granted  they do arrays fairly well    some database field  IN   firstValue    secondValue    thirdValue     But the following doesn t work at all    some database field  NOT IN   firstValue    secondValue    thirdValue     Even though the language does have a NOT operator

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MS Access Visual Basic for Applications  VBA  was also pretty bad   Access was bad altogether  in that it forced you down a weak paradigm and was deceptively simple to get started  but a nightmare to finish

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Granted  I don t have that much experience with different languages  but I gotta say Python  Even though the language it self is okay  I just hate the             t  etc  indents  Even though the idea of  automatic  scope ending is fine  this just lead to too many errors   time spent pressing space 200 times to use other peoples code

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First  a few caveats  I tend to give a pass to languages that serve their intended purpose well enough  but get shoehorned by the corporate world into doing more than their designers intended  For that reason  I give a pass to VB and its VB-office variants  For quick prototyping  VB was hard to beat  It failed massively when people tried to use it for enterprise-level work  Same for Perl  which is a great scripting utility which somehow got promoted to the CGI language du jour back in the day   But a language that fails to meet expectations  even on its own terms  For me  that s no contest  JavaScript  for three big reasons     lack of decent debugging capabilities  Firebug helps  but it s not enough    the way it simply halts whenever there s an error  forcing the programmer to add alert  in functionX   just to make sure you made it to functionX  and its infuriatingly obscure error messages    And if I were allowed to choose a framework  it s likewise an easy choice  JSF and IceFaces

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CSS  For basic styling its OK  and selectors are pretty cool  but there s something a little bit sadistic about the box model  floats and clearing   Hacking the language to make it do fundamental things  such as move one box below another  is all in a days work    Here we are living in the future and just getting basic design elements to work  like rounded corners or drop shadows  is an exercise in futility   The concept of  reusability  pretty much ends with Ctrl-C Ctrl-V  Even a seasoned CSS writer will rarely touch someone else s stylesheet - meaning that basic layouts are routinely rewritten again and again all around the world   Of course it shouldn t take all the flack - any hope it had of offering something truly useful to the world was cruelly dashed upon the rocks by the de facto  platform  for the language - Internet Explorer

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Definitely the worst language I ve ever used was Oz  It is a failed attempt to create a multiparadigm programming language  As you can imagine it ends up being really obscure and with an extremely complicated syntax  You have different delimiters to mark that you are in working in a functional way or in a imperative way  I always find a little strange defining classes with functional non side effect method parts

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Lingo  for Shockwave Flash  or whatever it was   Quite horrible  basic-ish thing with a bit too dynamic type system  The editor sucked  the debugger sucked  Arghh   It probably didn t help that the app I had to take upon my shoulders was written by scriptkiddies  which used the type of a variable to steer control flow   If it s a string  we re in mode A  so it means X  if it s an int  we re in mode B  so it means Y                           I like Python  and I suppose something equally horrible could ve been made there  but the community and tools are much nicer and rigorous

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JCL  Job Control Language  has to be the worst thing I have ever touched

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MUMPS  I worked in it for a couple years  but have done a complete brain dump since then  All I can really remember was no documentation  at my location  and cryptic commands   It was horrible  Horrible  HORRIBLE

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Any language can be the worst in a right hands  And improper teamwork makes it even worse  I mean  if it s not fun enough to shot in your own foot  you can always try shooting some coworkers feet  So far the best language I ve seen to do so is C    You can really hurt colleagues brain with it

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FORTRAN 77  To be fair  perhaps that in 1977 it was a pretty good language  but by the time 1999 rolled around I had to maintain a FORTRAN 77 program that was originally started by my advisor when he was a grad student sometime in the 1970 s   on punch cards  orignally    The program was  enhanced  hacked  plugged for over twenty years by people of various abilities     The oldest code was ALLCAPS  chock full of GOTO statements  global variables  and functions with more parameters than I have fingers   Originally variable names in Fortran were limited to 6 characters  but to save bytes most variables were given such descriptive names as  A    B    AA    II   etc   Granted  much of my experience was related to how the program was written  but the language didn t really encourage good programming style    Implicit typing depending on the first letter of the variable name  e g  names that started with an  I  to  N  were integers  otherwise the default was REAL  Fixed statement layout  a holdover from punch cards  column 0 would indicate a comment line if it had a  C   labels in columns 1-5  continuation character in column 6  statements in columns 7-72  Statement labels  numeric labels at that  KEYWORDS WERE ALL CAPS   Thankfully it s been 10 years since I ve looked at FORTRAN and I ve forgotten more of the annoyances that I remember

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LOLCODE     HAI CAN HAS STDIO  VISIBLE  HAI WORLD   KTHXBYE   Seriously  the worst programming language ever is that of Makefiles  Totally incomprehensible  tabs have a syntactic meaning and not even a debugger to find out what s going on

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Here is the contribution to my own question   Origin LabTalk  My all-time favourite in this regard is Origin LabTalk  In LabTalk the maximum length of a string variable identifier is one character  That is  there are only 26 string variables at all  Even worse  some of them are used by Origin itself  and it is not clear which ones    From the manual      LabTalk uses the   notation to define   a string variable  A legal string   variable name must be a   character   followed by a single alphabetic   character  a letter from A to Z     String variable names are   caseinsensitive  Of all the 26 string   variables that exist  Origin itself   uses 14    Doors DXL  For me the second worst in my opinion is Doors DXL  Programming languages can be divided into two groups  Those with manual memory management  e g  delete  free  and those with a garbage collector  Some languages offer both  but DXL is probably the only language in the world that supports neither  OK  to be honest this is only true for strings  but hey  strings aren t exactly  the most rarely used data type in requirements engineering software   The consequence is that memory used by a string can never be reclaimed and DOORS DXL leaks like sieve   There are countless other quirks in DXL  just to name a few    DXL function syntax  DXL arrays

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PHP  In no particular order    Inconsistent function names and argument orders   Because there are a zillion functions  each one of which seems to use a different naming convention and argument order   Lets see    is it foo bar or foobar or fooBar    and is it needle  haystack or haystack  needle   The PHP string functions are a perfect example of this  Half of them use str foo and the other half use strfoo   Non-standard date format characters   Take j for example   In UNIX  which  by the way  is what everyone else uses as a guide for date string formats   j returns the day of the year with leading zeros  In PHP s date function j returns the day of the month without leading zeros     Still No Support for Apache 2 0 MPM   It s not recommended  Why isn t this supported   When you make the underlying framework more complex by not having completely separate execution threads  completely separate memory segments and a strong sandbox for each request to play in  feet of clay are introduced into PHP s system   Link So    it s not supported  cause it makes things harder   Cause only the things that are easy are worth doing right   To be fair  as Emil H pointed out  this is generally attributed to bad 3rd-party libs not being thread-safe  whereas the core of PHP is    No native Unicode support   Native Unicode support is slated for PHP6 I m sure glad that we haven t lived in a global environment where we might have need to speak  to people in other languages for the past  oh 18 years  Oh wait   To be fair  the fact that everything doesn t use Unicode in this day and age really annoys me  My point is I shouldn t have to do any extra  work to make Unicode happen  This isn t only a PHP problem      I have other beefs with the language  These are just some  Jeff Atwood has an old post about why PHP sucks  He also says it doesn t matter  I don t agree but there we are

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I really don t like Visual Basic  even the  NET versions   Frankly  I find the core of the language way to verbose   For example   If condition1   condition2 Then       Else If condition1  gt  condition2 Then       End If  Public Function SomeFunction ByVal arg1 As String  ByVal arg2 As Integer  As String       End Function   But in C    if  condition1    condition2            else if  condition1    condition2             public string SomeFunction string arg1  int arg2              And obviously many other languages like F   Python  etc  are much less verbose  I honestly feel like it takes me twice as long to use VB than other languages because of this   I know this is quite a shallow answer  in part because it doesn t address some of the language concerns  like PHP s over use of global functions    But from a humanistic   experience-oriented  perspective  VB simply makes me grumpy

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PowerDynamo  It was a product from Sybase that stored the webapp code right in the database along with your data   There was no variable scope  and the strlen   function was essentially a random number generator

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My vote is DB C DX which is based on the DATABUS   I am sure most of you guys have never heard of it  and those that have     I am sorry

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No-one had mentioned DCL

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For me it d have to be FileMaker   The ScriptMaker  This screenshot shows the until recently named  ScriptMaker   which had many improvements in FileMaker 9 such as Ctrl C Ctrl V shortcuts for copying and pasting  and a non-modal dialog so you could edit more than one script at once    http   images macnn com macnn reviews filemaker 9proadvanced-ice feature1 main png  You edit individual Scripts using this dialog box  script  steps   shown on the left  are added into the list on the left hand side  by double clicking   and are moved up and down  using the little blob to the left of  Set Web Viewer    Only one line can be moved at once  and commenting for the purposes of temporarily disabling script steps is only available in the Advanced version of FileMaker Pro   Constructing a Script effectively ruins your wrists  as you re swapping between keyboard and mouse thousands of times an hour typing stuff into the the little config boxes and re-arranging your lines of code   A script is technically a procedure  and can be passed ONE parameter  Yup  just one  If you want more than one  you have to effectively combine your parameters using some delimiter  pass it to the script  then split the parameters out  Before scripts could have parameters at all  before FM7 IIRC   it was normal to use globals to pass data around   This guy wrapped most of his hate into a hoax FileMaker 11 sneak preview

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In the mid 90   s I worked in a small management consulting firm using a GIS product called MapInfo which had a weak scripting language called MapBasic   I don   t remember the specifics  but basically at that time there were objects  which could only be instantiated when hard coded  as opposed to instantiating with variables    This was a total pain in that it appeared to do everything you needed done  until you actually attempted to implement   Implementation was either impossible or very kludge heavy   I was a novice at that point and had a lot of difficulty a  predicting what could and could not be done  and b  explaining why to my non-programming manager   It was frustrating none the less   There are a lot of languages and tools which are weak in certain areas  but after dealing with Map Basic  even Visual Basic 3 0 felt liberating     -I don   t remember if it was all objects or only certain ones

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Seriously  Perl  It s just a pain in the ass to code with for beginners and even for semi-professionals which work with perl on a daily basis  I can constantly see my colleagues struggle with the language  building the worst scripts  like 2000 lines with no regard of any well accepted coding standard  It s the worst mess i ve ever seen in programming  Now  you can always say  that those people are bad in coding  despite the fact that some of them have used perl for a lot of years  now   but the language just encourages all that freaking shit that makes me scream when i have to read a script by some other guy

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IT baffles me sometimes to why a software company would develop its own scripting language to interface with their software  rather than building a strong API that can interface with your scripting language of choice  My vote goes to TransCAD s scripting language

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Webspeed and SpeedScript   Just terrible  no explanation

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TCL  It only compiles code right before it executes  so it s possible that if your code never went down branch A while testing  and one day  in the field it goes down branch A  it could have a SYNTAX ERROR

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Symbian C   Well  it is not C    It s learning a whole new language altogether and it doesn t work that well

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Old-skool BASICs with line numbers would be my choice  When you had no space between line numbers to add new lines  you had to run a renumber utility  which caused you to lose any mental anchors you had to what was where   As a result  you ended up squeezing in too many statements on a single line  separated by colons   or you did a goto or gosub somewhere else to do the work you couldn t cram in

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The worst language I  worked  with  was  karol  the robot      which was a programming language in German  And could do nothing more than move a robot on screen xD

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I m surprised no one has mentioned Sybase PowerBuilder   Confusing syntax Confusing object model Lack of native regular expression support Difficult to use IDE  esp the tool palette

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Well since this question refuses to die and since the OP did prod me into answering     I humbly proffer for your consideration Authorware  AW  as the worst language it is possible to create   n b  I m going off recollection here  it s been  6 years since I used AW  which of course means there s a number of awful things I can t even remember   the horror  the horror http   img brothersoft com screenshots softimage a adobe authorware-67096-1 jpeg  Let s start with the fact that it s a Macromedia product  -10 points   a proprietary language  -50 more  primarily intended for creating e-learning software and moreover software that could be created by non-programmers and programmers alike implemented as an iconic language AND a text language  -100    Now if that last statement didn t scare you then you haven t had to fix WYSIWYG generated code before  hello Dreamweaver and Frontpage devs    but the salient point is that AW had a library of about 12 or so elements which could be dragged into a flow  Like  Page  elements  Animations  IFELSE  and GOTO  -100   Of course removing objects from the flow created any number of broken connections and artifacts which the IDE had variable levels of success coping with  Naturally the built in wizards  -10  were a major source of these   Fortunately you could always step into a code view  and eventually you d have to because with a limited set of iconic elements some things just weren t possible otherwise  The language itself was based on TUTOR  -50  - a candidate for worst language itself if only it had the ambition and scope to reach the depths AW would strive for - about which wikipedia says         the TUTOR language was not easy to   learn  In fact  it was even suggested   that several years of experience with   the language would be required before   programmers could build programs worth   keeping    An excellent foundation then  which was built upon in the years before the rise of the internet with exactly nothing  Absolutely no form of data structure beyond an array  -100   certainly no sugar  real men don t use switch statements    -10   and a large splash of syntactic vinegar   --  was the comment indicator so no decrement operator for you    -10   Language reference documentation was provided in paper or zip file formats  -100   but at least you had the support of the developer run usegroup and could quickly establish the solution to your problem was to use the DLL or SWF importing features of AW to enable you to do the actual coding in a real language   AW was driven by a flow  with necessary PAUSE commands  and therefore has all the attendant problems of a linear rather than event based system  -50   and despite the outright marketing lies of the documentation it was not object oriented  -50  either  All code reuse was achieved through GOTO  No scope  lots of globals  -50    It s not the language s fault directly  but obviously no source control integration was possible  and certainly no TDD  documentation generation or any other add-on tool you might like   Of course Macromedia met the challenge of the internet head on with a stubborn refusal to engage for years  eventually producing the buggy  hard to use  security nightmare which is Shockwave  -100  to essentially serialise desktop versions of the software through a required plugin  -10   AS HTML rose so did AW stagnate  still persisting with it s shockwave delivery even in the face of IEEE SCORM javascript standards   Ultimately after years of begging and promises Macromedia announced a radical new version of AW in development to address these issues  and a few years later offshored the development and then cancelled the project  Although of course Macromedia are still selling it  EVIL BONUS -500    If anything else needs to be said  this is the language which allows spaces in variable names  -10000     If you ever want to experience true pain  try reading somebody else s uncommented hungarian notation in a language which isn t case sensitive and allows variable name spaces     Total Annakata Arbitrary Score  AAS   -11300 Adjusted for personal experience  OutOfRangeException   apologies for length  but it was cathartic

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APF  You are eprobably lucky enough never to have heard of this nightmare  It was an expensive add on to IBMs mainframe hierachical database transaction monitor IMS system  Where to start   There was no support for arrays  If you had an array of ten items well you coded ITEM1  ITEM2 etc  and wrote ten lines of code to process each item   Your code was stored in the database and interprated at run time  Do to the internal stucture of the thing your code was broken up and stored in several records  It was absurdly easy to overwrite someone elses code   Some of you code was associated with the transaction  IMS speak for a service  but some of you code was assoicated with the database record -- if you got it wrong bits of your program ran every time someone accessed a record   No debugger  the  compiler  only did basic syntax checking most errors appared at run time  with one of it four error messsages   One of these error messages was  INVALID DATA TYPE  -- thats all  no variable name  no line number  no clue   Just plain horrible

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No answer about Cobol yet   O

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Objective-C   The annotations are confusing  using brackets to call methods still does not compute in my brain  and what is worse is that all of the library functions from C are called using the standard operators in C  -  and    and it seems like the only company that is driving this language is Apple   I admit I have only used the language when programming for the iPhone  and looking into programming for OS X   but it feels as if C   were merely forked  adding in annotations and forcing the implementation and the header files to be separate would make much more sense

[programming-languages] What is the worst programming language you ever worked with?

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