Designing the Worst Programming Language Ever

[Gord_in_Toronto]

The Worst Programming Language Ever.

Mark Rendle has a try at designing it. If you have an hour to waste. (I watched in a window while I did something useful else.)



But he does miss one construct!

The wonderful ALTERED GO TO from COBOL. If used, it makes the program undebuggable.

 

[a_unique_person]

Picking on COBOL is boring. It was designed in the 1950s and was ground breaking. It enabled average programmers to write useful code for a business.


The code displays includes the JCL which is not part of the COBOL program. It was intended to be able to be transportable between different computer architectures.


In a time when it was either FORTRAN, LISP or COBOL, COBOL was essential and it worked.

 

[theprestige]

I don't have an hour to watch a video. What are the qualifying attributes of this attempt at the worst programming language ever?

 

[Yalius]

Eh, I'm kinda partial to a language called Malbolge. Here's the "Hello, World!" code:

(=<`#9]~6ZY327Uv4-QsqpMn&+Ij"'E%e{Ab~w=_:]Kw%o44Uqp0/Q?xNvL:`H%c#DD2^WV>gY;dts76qKJImZkj

 

[Darat]

I don't have an hour to watch a video. What are the qualifying attributes of this attempt at the worst programming language ever?

Humour.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Picking on COBOL is boring. It was designed in the 1950s and was ground breaking. It enabled average programmers to write useful code for a business.


The code displays includes the JCL which is not part of the COBOL program. It was intended to be able to be transportable between different computer architectures.


In a time when it was either FORTRAN, LISP or COBOL, COBOL was essential and it worked.

That is actually something I would never do. My programming started with 1620 Assembler, then FORTRAN, then 1401 Autocoder and then COBOL.

COBOL is a great language for its purpose and programs, when written properly, are truly self documenting. There is a very good reason, however, that the ALTERED GO TO should never be used.

I was programming n both FORTRAN and COBOL when PL/1 was introduced and took the first intro course offered by IBM at the time. Most of the other students in the course were programmers from the Toronto IBM Scientific Data Centre. I was vastly amused when these experienced FORTRAN programmers struggled with COBOL data concepts. They missed their FORMAT.

 

[novaphile]

Picking on COBOL is boring. It was designed in the 1950s and was ground breaking. It enabled average programmers to write useful code for a business.


The code displays includes the JCL which is not part of the COBOL program. It was intended to be able to be transportable between different computer architectures.


In a time when it was either FORTRAN, LISP or COBOL, COBOL was essential and it worked.

And COBOL just keeps on chugging along.

However, there's no hundred line piece of COBOL code that can't be replaced with a thousand lines of java code, extensions and libraries.

Hopefully they'll get it all done before the last whitebeard retires.

 

[Wudang]

And COBOL just keeps on chugging along.

However, there's no hundred line piece of COBOL code that can't be replaced with a thousand lines of java code, extensions and libraries.

Hopefully they'll get it all done before the last whitebeard retires.

Plenty of young COBOL programmers in India and other countries maintaining code for HSBC mainframes.