Worst ideas/features in programming languages?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Sunday, 24 October 2021 at 10:21:22 UTC, claptrap wrote:
> Because boolean algebra was already a thing and it was symbolic 
> in nature. So making it wordy would probably seem a bit odd, 
> maybe childish to some people. It'd be like writing arithmetic 
> expressions like this...
>
> 1 plus 1 equals 2
>
> If you can understand why people wouldn't want to write 
> arithmetic expressions like that, surely you can understand why 
> some people wouldn't want wordy boolean expressions?

I think "not being childish" is a sign of fashion-elitism if it 
makes code less legible. Many languages that predated C++'s 
uptake did use more intuitive syntax and had a less noisy 
appearance.

C++ does provide "and" and "or" as keywords though, but people 
probably don't want to appear as being "not proficient" so I 
don't actually see it in published code. I have found that using 
them makes my own code slightly faster to read, so I have 
recently started to use them. Makes sense to me that "if", 
"while", "or", "and" ties to flow control, and "&", "|", "+", "/" 
ties to calculating expressions. I find it slightly easier to 
read such code when I skim over it (without digging into the 
specifics).

The line noise does of course make programs look more impressive 
to non-coders: "Whoa, that looks complex, you must be very 
clever".