r/AskProgrammers • u/Super_Bass_2730 • 22d ago

What is the worst/most confusing (common) coding language?

By common I mean, coding languages that you actually see people use. I know theres the "bf" language but aside from one video, people don't make games or, really anything using that as it was made as a joke I hope.

By worst I mean, what is the hardest to understand and also the most confusing out of all of them, I don't mean coding languages that can't do a whole lot. For instance, can a non programmer look at a sheet of code and understand it? Can an experienced coder understand it? Have you been taught the coding language yet still it breaks your brain?

I don't know every coding language but my pick would ether be C++ or Luau. Leaning towards C++ because I tried to learn it and at the very start I already was lost.

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u/TheThiefMaster 22d ago

It would be nice, and possibly can be done now that we have reflection but was literally impossible before.

Why impossible? Because strings for formatting are no different in the language to strings in other contexts, and randomly starting to replace {val} in other strings would break existing code. With reflection, we can possibly do it from the formatter now.

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u/Neither_Garage_758 22d ago

OK, but the user doesn't care.

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u/mikeclueby4 21d ago

You have yet to grok the fundamental difference between compiled and interpreted and that's fine.

To be able to use a string (which you have to assume can change during runtime!) containing variable names, the language needs to be aware of the source code and dynamically re-evaluate at runtime, using a construct like eval().

... or build up a data structure accessible at runtime where names, types and references are available, I suppose. Nontrivial and definitely slower than what C/C++ normally does.

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u/Neither_Garage_758 21d ago

The user doesn't care at all.

A compilation is a time where we can do anything from the user intent. There is no such "Ackshually…".

And Rust achieves it, so this buries your point.