Worst ideas/features in programming languages?

[jfondren]

On Thursday, 14 October 2021 at 17:02:49 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
> On Thursday, 14 October 2021 at 16:48:12 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
>> On Monday, 11 October 2021 at 21:41:45 UTC, monkyyy wrote:
>>> * sword of damocles of safe by default or who knows what 
>>> koolaid being enabled one day
>>
>> Interesting. What is it about safe by default that would worry 
>> you?
>
> I've interacted with monkyyy a bunch in the community Discord. 
> He's the kind of programmer who would rather write code with 
> undefined behavior and get away with it than follow any kind of 
> compiler-enforced rules.
>
> Most programmers with this attitude eventually get it beaten 
> out of them by painful experience. I wouldn't put too much 
> stock in it.

The emphasis there should be on "sword of damocles" (uncertainty 
wrt. a future negative outcome) and "being enabled one day" (a 
change in the language).

d is currently @system by default, and making it @safe by default 
is a breaking change that requires people to run through their 
code and change it, even if just to add a @system: at the top. If 
you personally greatly value a breaking change then maybe you 
won't mind this kind of maintenance, but others it's imposed 
bitrot.

dub could be in the position of automatically trying --revert= 
flags if the latest tag release is older than some breaking 
change to dmd