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InfoQ Homepage Presentations The Worst Programming Language Ever

The Worst Programming Language Ever

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Summary

Mark Rendle runs an interactive session for defining the worst programming language of all times, including the worst syntax, semantics and runtime.

Bio

Mark Rendle is the founder and Chief Developer of Zudio, a web-based management toolkit for Windows Azure storage. Before starting Zudio, Mark developed other people’s software for more than 20 years, in systems ranging from Informix ESQL/C and Perl to .NET 4.5 and Node.js, and literally everything in-between. Mark contributes to Simple.Data and Simple.Web (which Zudio is built on).

About the conference

Begun in 2012 this now annual conference hosted in Vilnius, Lithuania brings the best of the developer world to the Baltic's. The overall theme is building stuff, we have a heavy focus on lessons from trenches from the people that were there.

Recorded at:

Jul 02, 2015

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Community comments

  • There is a wikipedia entry for BS. Hang on, is that the same bs?

    by Peter Willems,

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    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bs_(programming_language)

  • Generic comment

    by Menplant Plant,

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    Really cool idea, I like the presentation but I think there is a quite some stuff missing starting with you cant see the last slide with the crowds suggestions and a few points I would have mentioned;
    -recursion (a nice to have thing but it can make simple routines utterly confusing)
    -switch case, break (how many times do you really used a switch case without a break)
    -FORTRAN (older implementations treated numbers like mutable variables, that value you could easily/accidentally change)

    and on a final note (if it can be counted as a programming language), JCL!
    Oh boy consistency will never be the same. JCL is just about calling programs controlling the input and output. Starting with that you are limited to 80 characters per line and which are again separated in specific fields that tell you were you can write what which also change on some occasions (continuation lines). You have to write // at the start of every line except for comments but an empty // line terminates the JCL. Then you can make Condition with the COND parameter which states that it fails if the condition is true. So you are basically just calling programs and to do some basic stuff like creating or copying files you call system programs, which use different parameters with different names and different behavior altogether. Try to look solve it using google , haha IBM doesn't make it that easy

    P.S. worth mentioning in this context xkcd.com/1537/
    P.P.S. Instead of destructor use TTL and function are restricted to 1 parameter (multiple have to be stored in an Array index starting at 1)

  • Re: Generic comment

    by Karl Harbour,

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    Ah, JCL. Just about remember that.

    For what it's worth, the IBM COBOL example near the beginning of the presentation is actually partly JCL, I believe.

  • Re: There is a wikipedia entry for BS. Hang on, is that the same bs?

    by Juan Facorro,

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    I don't think so, but there is a GitHub repo with a reference implementation :P github.com/BSLang/BS

  • Switch statement

    by Drew Van Zandt,

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    What BS needs is a switch statement with no break statement.

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