Re:Intercal: The Worst Programming Language Ever [video]
by jschwartzi on Thursday December 18, 2014 @10:39AM
(#8767727)
Sed is like the predecessor to Brainfuck. Every keyword worth using is a single letter, and there are the match space and hold space to keep track of. Plus if you accidentally forget a -r at the beginning, regexes that would work in any other program may not in Sed.
Sadly I get more mileage out of Sed and Tr than any general-purpose text processing language(Perl) for batch processing text.
Re:Intercal: The Worst Programming Language Ever [video]
by progmanal on Thursday December 18, 2014 @03:06PM
(#8769366)
Lucky, Mumps also has the single letter distinction.
Re:Intercal: The Worst Programming Language Ever [video]
by qhfgva on Thursday December 18, 2014 @11:59AM
(#8768240)
I haven't thought of that for years. When I was doing my masters I actually TAed a class (CS for non-majors) for one of the creators of MUMPS and used that language for the labs. It was sort of hilarious learning it and trying to help newbies use it.
Can't complain too much since he gave me a very generous letter of recommendation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS
sed also takes some getting used to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sed
Many modern languages sort of have 'DO COME FROM' in the form of exceptions. Having to execute PLEASE regularly (but not too often) is not that different from a buggy version of Oracle PL/SQL I had to use once, where single-line comments sometimes made the next line be ignored as well. Or a research language called Emerald for which the implementation needed extra comments or dummy statements to make the compiler not crash + the garbage collector was buggy so you needed to create and manipulate dummy objects Just So to make the garbage collector throw /them/ away instead of the ones you actually cared about.
I'd say the only unique aspects of Intercal are the stupid numbers and the delightfully twisted way they added threads to it (by having more than one DO COME FROM statement with the same label).