The worst programming language ever

[mfleming]

(11-25-2021 07:54 PM)toml_12953 Wrote:  

(11-25-2021 02:46 PM)John Smitherman Wrote:  My vote for the worst is COBOL.

What? You don't like English? COBOL was my first language professionally. It's very easy to maintain. Many large corporations still have millions of lines of COBOL code running perfectly every day.

If you want to knock a highly verbose language (as opposed to a highly succinct language like APL, which I adore) nothing beats ATLAS. See its Wikipedia entry here. The language is meant to reflect the specification style found in a mil-spec Test Requirements Document or TRD (pronounced "turd" by all those involved). Early in my career I spent many months in front of an HP1000 terminal pounding out lines and lines of code like

Code:


010200  APPLY, AC SIGNAL, VOLTAGE-PP 7.5V, FREQ 3 KHZ, CNX HI=P1-1 $

010300  VERIFY, (VOLTAGE-AV INTO 'VAVG'), AC SIGNAL, VOLTAGE-PP RANGE 64V TO 1V, SAMPLE-WIDTH 10MSEC, 
          SYNC-VOLTAGE 2 MAX 5, SYNC-NEG-SLOPE, MAX-TIME 0.5, GO-TO-STEP 400 IF GO, LL 0.5 UL 50, 
          CNX HI=P2-4 LO=P2-5, SYNC HI=P2-8 LO=P2-5 $

Like parens in Lisp, ATLAS was comma comma comma. Mind numbing. Absolutely mind numbing.