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Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language?

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On Fri, 31 Oct 2025 06:48:08 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

> One mentioned COBOL (which for him was worse than Fortran), but nobody
> thought of BASIC. I guess that is now so far in the past, many among
> the interviewees wouldn’t even have any memories of using it ...

And/or that anybody using BASIC in a modern context is gonna be using
something like FreeBASIC, which is a vastly improved and perfectly
reasonable little language compared to the early microcomputer BASICs.

Re: Javascript, it's true that a lot of improvements have been made to
it, but from a certain perspective it's all lipstick on a pig; there's
been so many things slapped on to paper over some poor initial design
decisions or chase trends in web development over the years that at
this point it's a fossil shale of a language.

Anyway, there's things to dislike about most any language, but there
aren't too many that I'd universally condemn in my own assessment.
Pascal gets a frowny-face for design decisions that should never, ever
have made it past the initial draft of the first paper (making array
size part of the type specification was braindead from the start - an
impediment to good design *and* a burden on performance, all in the
name of avoiding a problem that there were much better solutions for,)
and while newer iterations have improved things somewhat, it would've
been better to throw it out and re-do from scratch...*but* the FP folks
do put a lot of effort into making it a full-featured and surprisingly
portable platform for development.

Another language that feels needlessly gross and tedious is Java - it's
just *unreasonably* verbose, to the point where one is tempted to
employ a macro preprocessor just to condense sesquipedalian nonsense
like System.out.println() down to furshlugginer print() and so forth.
Any language that *requires* an IDE with weapons-grade autocomplete
deserves censure...but then it's somehow still the best solution we've
got for write-once-run-anywhere development, which is maddening :/

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What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language? Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-10-31 06:48 +0000
  Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language? David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> - 2025-10-31 13:28 +0100
  Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language? John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> - 2025-10-31 08:17 -0700
    Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language? bart <bc@freeuk.com> - 2025-10-31 22:47 +0000
    Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language? Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-11-01 06:26 +0000
    Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language? BGB <cr88192@gmail.com> - 2025-11-03 14:05 -0600
      Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language? Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-11-03 20:29 +0000
        Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language? BGB <cr88192@gmail.com> - 2025-11-03 14:55 -0600
          Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language? Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-11-03 23:10 +0000
            Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language? BGB <cr88192@gmail.com> - 2025-11-04 12:02 -0600
              Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language? Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-11-04 20:32 +0000
      Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language? John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> - 2025-11-03 15:56 -0800
    Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language? Kragen Javier Sitaker <kragen@canonical.org> - 2026-08-27 21:11 -0300
      Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language? Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-08-28 04:42 +0000
        Write Once, Run Anywhere (was Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language?) Kragen Javier Sitaker <kragen@canonical.org> - 2026-08-28 16:43 -0300
          Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language? Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-08-28 22:37 +0000
            the history of Java in Android (was Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language?) Kragen Javier Sitaker <kragen@canonical.org> - 2026-08-28 20:27 -0300
              Re: the history of Java in Android (was Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language?) Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-08-29 01:30 +0000
                Re: the history of Java in Android (was Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language?) Kragen Javier Sitaker <kragen@canonical.org> - 2026-08-29 15:24 -0300
                Re: the history of Java in Android (was Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language?) Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-08-29 21:57 +0000
            Python deliberately breaking backward compatibility (was Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language?) Kragen Javier Sitaker <kragen@canonical.org> - 2026-08-28 21:03 -0300
              Re: Python deliberately breaking backward compatibility (was Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language?) Keith Thompson <Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com> - 2026-08-28 18:10 -0700
                [meta] Date-formats in postings (was Re: Python deliberately breaking backward compatibility (was Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language?)) Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> - 2026-08-29 06:39 +0200
              Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language? Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-08-29 01:42 +0000
      Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language? John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> - 2026-08-28 09:59 -0700
  Re: What’s Your Least Favourite Programming Language? Kragen Javier Sitaker <kragen@canonical.org> - 2026-08-27 20:09 -0300

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