Closed Poll: Which language is the worst of the worst?
-
Continuing the discussion from Closed Poll: Which language is the least bad?:
We all know mikeTheLiar is the worst of the worst as far as old-school forum posters go, but what is the worst of the worst programming language?
[poll]
- ActionScript
- BASIC
- C
- C++
- C#
- COBOL
- ColdFusion
- FORTRAN
- Java
- Javascript
- Lua
- LISP/Scheme/etc
- MUMPS
- Objective-C
- Perl
- PHP
- PL/SQL
- Python
- Ruby
- Tcl
- VBA
- Visual Basic
- Visual Basic.NET
[/poll]
Right now you can only vote for one language in this entire list. Maybe some day we can have a Worst of the Worst™ tournament with languages organized into brackets.
-
Maybe some day we can have a Worst of the Worst™ tournament with languages organized into brackets.
Now. Do Make.
-
Man, that's a tough choice between C++ and Objective-C. It's too bad multi-voting is Doing It Wrong™.
There are several others in there that might be worst of the worst but I've never been exposed to them.
-
The worst I've worked with (bash/sh) isn't in the list, so PL/SQL can have a vote.
-
Are you sure that @blakeyrat isn't secretly the Worst of the Worst of old school posters and that @mikeTheLiar was merely just a stand-in?
-
I've seen a couple of MUMPS programs - not fun. Thankfully I've never had to maintain any.
-
Why is my Godzilla head missing? Is my webserver down?
-
I had to go look at the actual FTDWTF to check. No, it's not down.
-
Websense :-/
-
It works, @Dogsworth is probably just doing something wrong:
-
Websense is a barrier to long-animation GIFs.
-
MUMPS is of course terrible, but I've never programmed in it. Tcl, however, I did write, and it sucked ginormously. Who in the hell thinks that it is a good idea to treat everything, including a line of code, as a string, and then thinks there's no need for a parser? Probably the same school of programming that brought us analyzing HTML with regexps and the Shellshock bug. "I can match ( and ) with this expression, so I don't need no f*ing parser".
-
For the sake of completeness, are we going to add missing languages? If so I nominate J++, J#, F#, and Pascal. (not that I'd vote for any of them)
-
Unfortunately, Jeff Atewood says you can only change poll options within five minutes of creating the poll.
-
Because adding more options after that is clearly more civilised than having to make new polls.
-
FWIW, I voted for C. Not because it's the worst language taken on its own, but because at this point the (language badness) * (amount used) score is in contention for the highest.
-
Why is my Godzilla head missing? Is my webserver down?
Does it run windoze? It's probably doing updates.
-
FWIW, I voted for C. Not because it's the worst language taken on its own, but because at this point the (language badness) * (amount used) score is in contention for the highest.
And because you got an off-by-one error trying to vote C++, right?
-
FWIW, I voted for C. Not because it's the worst language taken on its own, but because at this point the (language badness) * (amount used) score is in contention for the highest.
More than PHP? WUT
-
And because you got an off-by-one error trying to vote C++, right?
As I said in another thread, while I'll be the first to agree that C++ has both some "questionable" design choices and a lot of WTFy emergent behavior... there is no kind of program ever that I would write in C in preference to C++, barring "there is not a C++ compiler for this platform" or "you're extending this existing C code base" (and in the latter case would work to move away from that situation if I were free to do so) or sometimes for interfaces between different modules. I might use different C++ subsets in different situations, but I would never pick C.
I could agree that C++ is both worse and better than C... but if I have to pick one, I think C++ is substantially better, and that means that C++ can't be my answer to this poll.
More than PHP? WUT
PHP doesn't underlay almost everything. You won't have a PHP bug that will cause a major security crisis across as "diverse" a crowd of sites as, say, the Heartbleed bug did.
-
You are familiar with how much of the web runs on WordPress, right?
-
You are familiar with how much of the web runs on WordPress, right?
(1) How many banks display your account info in WordPress and (2) all of those are using C too.
-
-
I voted C++, because even though they've been improving it since C++11, it took them 26 years before that to acknowledge that languages are supposed to evolve.
Sure, C might be worse for general programming, but it's meant to be a low level assembly-equivalent language with no high-level abstractions. The problem is idiots keep using it when they shouldn't.
-
I voted for C# because I would find it funny if that language won both the "best language" and the "worst language" award in this forum.
Filed Under: Thats the way I deem this comunity to work!
-
I'm torn between C++, Perl and PHP. Also I don't vote on polls because fuck gamification.
-
Who in the hell thinks that it is a good idea to treat everything, including a line of code, as a string, and then thinks there's no need for a parser?
There is a parser, in fact a general two-level context-sensitive one (as the context-free grammar isn't useful to anyone trying to understand what some code is really doing). You're just not supposed to think about it.
The general unity of code and data is a bit higher-order than most programmers are used to (except for Lisp programmers).
-
Jeff clearly didn't.
-
there is no kind of program ever that I would write in C in preference to C++, barring "there is not a C++ compiler for this platform"
Which is, in all fairness, about 99% of C's use cases today. And it's the best language for that - roughly structured, yet close to the metal and allowing you to break out to the assembly when you need it.
I was torn between C++, PHP, and MUMPS - in the end I chose MUMPS, because holy shit what the fuck is that.
-
I hereby decree that if PHP doesn't come in the top two results of this poll, I'm going to flag any future suggestion that PHP is TRWTF as lies and off-topic.
You're warned.
-
Java-the-language, actually. C++, to me, is better than Java at expressiveness, template syntactical infelicities aside. Also, Java represents the worst of the worst of the "OO-all-the-things!!!!111!!!!" camp; they somehow managed to make it so that you need to derive a new thing from Callable every time you need a function-like that can be passed around!
For the DiscoMultiPoll: Tcl, MUMPS, COBOL, SQL (yes SQL), pre-.NET VB (including VBA), PHP, and JS/ActionScript would all be on the list, for various reasons.
- Tcl is Lisp done Wrong™
- MUMPS is a pile of WTF in its own right (and might just make Chuck Moore cry at what it did to FORTH, which for how weird-seeming it is, isn't actually a WTF itself IMO)
- COBOL managed to bastardize an entire generation of data formats that we're still stuck with today
- SQL makes Date and Codd cry with its misshapen NULL handling, multiple not-quite-compatible-on-the-basics implementations, obvious missing features (such as LIMIT/OFFSET), and gigantic standard bloat (SQL in its full breadth is just as bad as C++ in that regard)
- pre .NET VB, JS, and PHP all suffer from the same fundamental issue: sloppy typing. Instead of 'everything is an X' (Tcl, perhaps to a lesser extent Perl, Lua), or properly done dynamic typing (such as in Lisp/Scheme/Clojure/..., Python, or Ruby), they just let programmers mash unrelated types together and hope to sort it out on the backend, which is uniformly a terrible idea, and the main reason dynamic languages get such a bad rap from underinformed developers.
-
I voted C++. I'm competent at C, also C#, but when I find myself in C++ land I constantly have to ask coworkers how basic stuff works and my response is usually TDEMSYR followed by "This would have taken me 3.4 nanoseconds to solve in C# and most of that is compiler time."
-
I voted for Ruby for its “special” habit of hiding bizarre landmines in its implementation.
-
Polls aren't really gamification though. They've been a forum feature since forever.
-
Polls aren't really gamification though
Well, there was the "Break Discourse with Polls" game a while ago.
-
Why is my Godzilla head missing?
I never once saw that godzilla head even on the old forums. I always assumed you fucked something up.
-
VBA edges out classic VB due to the many, many wonderful (in the "maybe if I head desk enough times, I'll lose consciousness" version of wonderful) things I've seen non-programers try to make it do (mostly in Excel).
Though I did once see a (large and fairly dangerous) piece of industrial equipment being completely controlled by VB - you just try and do real-time control using forms timers...
-
Voted objective C here.
I mean clearly mumps or what not is worse, so please remove mumps and all obviously bad languages from the poll, so we can concentrate on voting on the ones we passionately hate.
-
@created_just_to_disl said:
I mean clearly mumps or what not is worse, so please remove mumps and all obviously bad languages from the poll, so we can concentrate on voting on the ones we passionately hate.
Agreed, it's kind of like a "Which disease is the worst" poll with these options
- Cold
- Influenza
- Athlete's Foot
- Bronchitis
- Seasonal Allergies
- Ebola
-
Clearly, Athlete's foot. The others go away after a while one way or another.
-
I'd vote for Ebola because the news outlets tell me that's what I should panic about now.
-
I voted for PHP and I guess the poll should state "in your experience". I haven't used MUMPS nor COBOL, so I'm not sure how painful they are to code with. PHP in the other hand is a known devil to me.
-
Don't forget Powershell and batch files
-
Don't forget Powershell and batch files
Powershell is good, if obscure. Batch files should die in a fire, though, and I'm saying that with a lot of sentiment for DOS.
-
I voted BASIC.
Because a whole generation of fuck-awful programmers look back on it with rose-tinted glasses, saying
It's what we learned to program with, ergo it's a good teaching language
No, it's not. It's a fucking awful language, and we learned to program despite having to use it; anyone with any talent moved on to other stuff as fast as possible.
-
According to TDWTF, these are the top three worst languages:
- MUMPS (14 votes)
- PHP (6 votes)
- C++ (5 votes)
-
I hereby decree that if PHP doesn't come in the top two results of this poll, I'm going to flag any future suggestion that PHP is TRWTF as lies and off-topic.
You're warned.
So PHP is only second worst, therefore it continues to be legitimately TRWTF at least ⅓ of the time. This is acceptable.
-
⅓
-
Yes if you use the raw character, that's fine. But not entities
-
arm_ok