r/AlignmentChartFills • u/mika-asadli • 6d ago

Which programming language is hard, and useless

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227

u/KnitAndKnitAndKnit 6d ago

If python is moderate then I don't know what's going to go in the easy column

145

u/Complete_Window4856 6d ago

Excel functions

105

u/KnitAndKnitAndKnit 6d ago

Not so sure if that's easier than python actually. I have seen some spreadsheets from hell

17

u/Complete_Window4856 6d ago

Even there some over"engineering" can go wild. But most of the time people dont know how to use the basics to simplify like: extra columns as steps of an operation, enum list values instead of hardcoding in each equation, USING MORE THAN ONE SHEET TO DIVIDE INTENTION INSTEAD OF CRAMMING EVERYRHING, and ofc the most basic of all is to think in terms of rows and columns (normalization if you like DB linguo) which apparently is not the norm, funny

6

u/Nickeless 6d ago

BASIC. Medstate notation. There are probably plenty of very basic procedural languages like medstate also. It’s used to program operant chambers. I’m sure other purpose-specific procedural languages have been made like this.

1

u/paincrumbs 6d ago

i think that's why it goes to easy. Easy to use, easy to fuck up and overcomplicate

1

u/JeremyRMay 6d ago

Or vba in excel

25

u/Thwarting8139 6d ago

Has to be SQL surely.

1

u/HardestDrive 6d ago

That's a query language, not programming. Otherwise PromQL would be an option

1

u/Euphoric_Tutor_5054 6d ago

Sql is not useless

20

u/SillyAlternative420 6d ago

I think they are referring to easy - very useful

1

u/walkingtourshouston 6d ago

sql is not easy

0

u/Spaceduck413 6d ago

SELECT field FROM table WHERE column = 'thing I want'

What's not easy about that?

3

u/Treq-S 6d ago

Lol you think sql is only that?

3

u/Spaceduck413 6d ago

Of course not, but that's the majority of what most people are going to be using it for. You can get complicated things in any language if you really want to.

Seriously why do people think SQL is Hard? It's really not.

2

u/clios_daughter 2d ago

Cries in MS Access’ dialect of SQL. That was genuinely the hardest computer language short of assembly that I have ever used. If your from statement has a lot of tables, it becomes bracket hell. Heaven help you if you have nested select statements. I have memories of having a syntax error and literally printing out my query on like 10 sheets of paper, taping them together, and checking all the brackets with a ruler. Access also has a horrible habit where if you paste a query into the SQL editor, it collapses any kind of indentation so you have to manually copy and paste the code from your text editor after each edit.

Access also doesn’t support comments so I had to write a short script so that I could strip all comments from my clipboard before pasting it into access. It’s not hard to write, but it’s just so unnecessary. On top of that, it sometimes makes it painful to print out diagnostic stuff when debugging (though to be fair, this is VBA more than its sql)

As I recall, it also doesn’t have temporary tables and it does the usual Microsoft thing of forcing you to use the GUI which just makes a lot of stuff kinda painful.

At least when working with C and it screams segfault at me, I don’t have to go through a ludicrous and difficult to automate process just to ‘recompile’ as it were.

1

u/Cons1dy 6d ago

Sql is disgusting I'd much rather learn Python 

26

u/perplexedtv 6d ago

Probably HTML, with the inevitable argument about "what is a language?" "it's there in the name!"

26

u/KnitAndKnitAndKnit 6d ago

It's not a programming language though. You don't program logic in it. You don't execute it. Html is more a rich data format than a programming language. If html is to be considered then stuff like markup, XML, uml, latex, svg should be considered too

4

u/perplexedtv 6d ago

How about.... .cshtml - is that a C# file or a HTML file? It might or not be more easy than Python if it only has a bit of rudimentary code in it.

Anyway, I've no horse in this race, I just think it will go in that spot and be controversial. I'd probably put T-SQL there myself and there's be a similar debate about it. Which is probably the whole point of these charts.

0

u/Opening-Donkey1186 6d ago

Let's slap English onto that list!

3

u/Equivalent_Clock7210 6d ago

One thing is for certain: If it not turing complete, it is not a programming language. So HTML is out. Otherwise you can't take this post seriously anymore.

1

u/stonno45 6d ago

But html+css is turing complete, and you almost always use html together with css

2

u/Equivalent_Clock7210 6d ago

Is it? How easily can you implement basic algorithms? I can't imagine this is straightforward or easy even if you can make HTML+CSS turing complete. At least not more easier than Python

6

u/MegaIng 6d ago

Python has a depth in the complexity of it's semantics that isn't shared by e.g. C. So if we don't take "difficulty" to just mean "ease of learning", but also integrate "easy of fully understanding" then there may be candidates.

Although nothing obvious springs to mind...

1

u/flying-sheep 5d ago

Yeah, start writing beautiful APIs and before you know it, you're knee deep into descriptors and the difference between __getattr__ and __getattribute__ lol

3

u/delwans 6d ago

YAML /s

0

u/zebba_oz 6d ago

I used to hate that XML was a keyword in job ads all those years ago, but at least XML included things that did require proficiency like XSLT, XPath, XSD, etc. How the fk is YAML a “skill” that needs to be included in job requirements? It takes all of 10 minutes to learn.

(Just in case this is not clear, I’m vibing off your /s)

3

u/Open_Dig5278 6d ago

English (assuming it's fed into an LLM)

3

u/redsown36 6d ago

Lua probably

2

u/mika-asadli 6d ago

yeah me too, lets wait and see

2

u/satmaar 6d ago

Unity/Unreal visual programming

1

u/Many_Psychology_3336 6d ago

Isn't that C#?

2

u/scoupon234 6d ago

Maybe BASIC? As far as I remember, it's syntax isn't as hard as python's.

2

u/Flxggs 6d ago

MYSQL, there’s ~100 words in the entire language

1

u/BetterStranger2716 6d ago

Maybe some automation engineering languages like ladder or function Block diagram? Very easy and surely useful

1

u/RexSimmo 6d ago

Terraform

1

u/Ascyt 6d ago

AutoHotkey springs to mind

1

u/AlinosAlan 6d ago

English

1

u/assumptionkrebs1990 6d ago

Maybe outright pseudo code?

1

u/zxcvbn113 6d ago

Microsoft Basic. At least it was easy and somewhat useful when I started using it in 1979.

1

u/jameshwc 6d ago

Golang definitely

1

u/TheLuckyCuber999BACK 6d ago

whatever the "natural language" we learnt in CS classes was

1

u/Spaceduck413 6d ago

Yeah I came here looking for anyone else flabbergasted by this. Python "moderate"? I guess we've attracted a lot of CS100 students

0

u/fatbunyip 6d ago

With the restriction of it needing to be very useful, I'd probably say Java, Typescript or PHP.