Worst ideas/features in programming languages?

[Dukc]

On Monday, 11 October 2021 at 15:59:10 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
> I'm brainstorming about what I'll talk about at DConf, and 
> during a conversation with Walter I thought it might be cool to 
> talk about:
>
> * Worst features implemented in a non-toy language

- Some C standard library functions. `gets` is the worst one, but 
`atof` and `atoi` are pretty useless too.

- The feature of some early C compilers that only the first 7 
characters of an identifier are significant.

- C casting and C++ template syntaxes.

- Disallowed free functions in Java and C#

- More than one feature of C# structs.

> * Worst features (in your opinion) in D

- Integer promotion without at least letting to assign the result 
back to original width without a cast

- Autodecoding. It would not be as bad if string literals were of 
some sort of wrapper type over the data, but autodecoding a plain 
array type just sucks.

> * Features you'd like to see in D

- The Phobos versioning scheme that is already in the works.

- Some way to enable preview/revert switches per module as 
opposed to per compilation. And same for autodecoding if possible.

- More compatibility between compiler / standard library versions 
in general.

> Ideas? Examples?

- Perhaps we should have a common agreement on what compiler 
versions should be used when long-term support for code is the 
goal. For example, we could agree on 2.084, 2.090, 2.096, 2.102 
etc.