Alright, this might start a flame war but it's not the intent. The intent is two fold, first I need a language that just seems evil or one that an evil individual would use to program in. And two is just for some fun jest.
Anyways, it's for a story I'm writing and in it there are some messed up programming going on. So far been tossing around ideas to use this is them and why:
Java: It's used greatly and is pretty easy to recognize. Some people find it to be written by Satan.
Python: Because it's unassuming, just don't trust it.
Perl: My favorite language.
Visual Basic: Pretty self explanatory.
C: Besides being pretty scary looking at times it's also efficient. Somehow always picture efficiency and evilness going hand in hand...
Lisp: Again, like Python Lisp just seems like a good natured language... underlined with evil...
FYI
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Probably the most "evil" language I've ever written in was JAM, on the Xerox Star (precursor to the Macintosh). It had no variables. If you wanted to store something, you had only a stack, the same stack used for everything else one uses a stack for (storing local variables, return addresses, etc), and God forbid you ever get something wrong! You could easily send your program off down a path "executing" your array of strings, or practically anything else. I still shudder thinking of it.
Also, side note. Think the system they'll be developing on is FreeBSD (daemon logo kind of sealed the deal). So Visual Basic will probably be out of the window... Which is a shame, because Dim just screams evil...
Anything that lets you directly access memory locations. Assembly or Machine code would be the ultimate, of course; but even versions of BASIC had "peek" and "poke" commands that would let your read and write data directly to specific memory locations. I believe C (or at least early versions, not sure about current ones) had the same capability. And of course C was notorious for the havoc that can ensue from memory buffer overflows and such, allowing all sorts of nasty things to happen.
"Please give us a simple answer, so that we don't have to think, because if we think, we might find answers that don't fit the way we want the world to be."
~ Terry Pratchett in Nation
For the record, I don't like Java. I really don't like Java.
But it all depends on what and how you use it. Perhaps ActiveX is a good example? An ActiveX control can be written in several different languages, but using a language in this manner is an abomination depending on what the control is supposed to do.
Ha ha, most of my posts here are my 666th posts. They don't tally them in the coffee lounge and I never leave it. And thank you, because you made my point more clear!
The worst I've used was Z80 assembly but I find Visual Basic pretty yucky. I always feel dirty when I write a user defined function for Excel. But then I thought Perl was horrible until I got to know it. Now I find it the most elegant. (And perhaps it's just me but it always seemed to be a lot like Modula.) Odd, though, I pretty much never use Perl anymore.
“The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.”
—Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web
BASH looks very, very interesting. That's added to the list of possibilities.
And Charles, Visual Basic does just seems purely evil. Dim, no thank you. Love perl however like you there's not much time to work in it (personal projects are all perl based)...
Well, think I'll be going with perl since the project I'm developing in will be done in perl. Think it's only fair to not bash another program while developing in one.
However, would still love to hear other people's inputs or parts of their programming life that has been hell.
Personal one was converting an online payment script from spaghetti C to PHP... Man that was ugly (think I still have some of the source on my old computer).
See alot of ugly spaghetti type PHP development so lean toward that as my ugliest. Java is the best of the best especially MVC approach with JSTL and EL. Any of the Unix shells (C, Korn and BASH) are nice including good old AWK.
Hehe, yeah, spaghetti PHP is quite rampant. However, personally needed something for actually developing an application, not templating a website
Perfect example is the IM System that is now under my control at the website I work... Will put it this way, the previous developer (now fired) used classes, however he used them as though they were Procedural... nothing linked together (user id's were sent from function to function through parameters, which was set through javascript... real secure...). Besides that, he used 3 different naming conventions for his functions\variables and then a bunch of other naming conventions just for the hell of it... e.g. he has the functions: im_sendMessage(), update_activity(), getStatus(), UserIMSettings(), etc... And that's not even mentioning how he's using the class, or not using it...
Arg, now there's a bunch of functions on the actual page to that need to be dealt with. Bottom line it's all being scratched out of existence. Now I'm in the mood for spaghetti and meatballs
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))) Thanks for your post.
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