The worst programming language ever

[David Hayden]

My votes for worst programming languages:

APL: A wonderfully expressive language, but it's basically write-only. reading an APL program is torture.

BCPL. Data is untyped. Operators are typed. So a variable is just a blob and if you want to add two integers you say blob (integer +) blob. It's up to you to ensure that the blobs are integers.

BCPL highlights something curious: at the machine code level, computers work like that: data (memory) has no type, but operators do. It's completely the opposite in high level languages where you specify your data's type and then "+" means different things depending on what type of data it's operating on.

Notice that syRPL is in between. Both data and operators are typed. It's up to the programmer to ensure that "integer add" (#+) is used with actual integers as arguments.