Worst ideas/features in programming languages?

[Superstar64]

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
> * Worst features (in your opinion) in D
> * Features you'd like to see in D
>
> Ideas? Examples?
>
> Thanks!

Not necessarily a feature, but I think the absence of hindley 
milner type inference is a big one. I think that statically typed 
languages should adopt it or at the very least be influenced by 
it unless they have a really good reason not too.

Types are completely optional in (vanilla) hindley milner. You 
can write code that looks like python and still have all the 
benefits of static typing. It also infers the most general type 
for the code you write. This makes your code as generic as 
possible unless you add a type annotation to make it less generic.

I also think that it can help in language design in general. Weak 
typing and subtyping, features that are generally disliked are 
incompatible with hindley milner. It gives good answers to what 
the type of a null pointer and an empty array are without 
resorting to void pointers and void arrays which feel hacky.