The Worst Programming Language Ever • Mark Rendle • YOW! 2014

Design Philosophy: Create the most difficult, frustrating and confusing programming language possible - not to make programming easier but to create a “pit of fail”

Key Features:

• Significant whitespace taken from Python, but implemented incorrectly
• Manual memory management requiring explicit deletion of everything
• 17-bit integers (instead of standard 16/32 bit)
• Single conditional statement “unless” (no if/else)
• Greek question mark as syntax element to create invisible errors
• Case sensitivity only for first character of identifiers
• PHP-style string handling with multiple incompatible string types
• Regular expressions as macro system
• UTF-256 encoding requiring web download of characters
• Line numbers in increments of 42
• Variables that become static after being accessed 3 times

Implementation Details:

• Semi-compiled with bytecode and VM embedded in every program
• Targeting ECMAScript 3 for browser compatibility
• Must be edited in Microsoft Word 2003
• Requires special euro symbol prefix for variables
• Halton catch fire as only exception type
• No garbage collection, manual memory management only

Marketing:

• Tagline: “BS. Why? Because you, that’s why.”
• Aims to run everywhere: systems, embedded, desktop, web
• Deliberately makes simple things complicated
• Documentation is explicitly prohibited

Historical Inspiration taken from:

• PHP’s inconsistency
• JavaScript’s type coercion
• Visual Basic’s awkward syntax
• COBOL’s verbose boilerplate
• INTERCAL’s deliberately difficult design