The worst programming language ever

[robve]

Thanks for sharing an entertaining video. I had ignored this video purposely before, thinking it is either uninformative or all about PL/I as a successor to Fortran, COBOL and Algol, the group of early PL that are commonly criticized in university undergraduate programming language courses for various reasons. This post made me reconsider, so I watched it till the end with some amusement.

Why PL/I? PL/I was the language that "combines features of numerous other languages" or "everything for everybody" (great quote from Sebesta). One of the many goals was that "there were to be no reserved words" to make programming "easier". As a consequence programmers could write code like this line that actually compiles and runs:

IF ELSE THEN ELSE=THEN ELSE THEN=ELSE

Take that RPL!

- Rob