The advice to not carry a grudge may be well-meaning, but it certainly didn’t come from anyone who’s wrestled with a computer for a living. Toil for any amount of time with the infernal logic of a programming language and you’ll know the horrors of the inky void where the worst bugs dwell.
Fans love to tout the advantages of their favorite programming languages and sing of the intuitive magic they'll bring to your coding fingers. Nearly every programming language was created by someone with a grand plan for simplifying their programming chores, and the creators usually succeed—at least in that narrow sense. The problem is that there are often secondary or tertiary effects that aren’t as wonderful.
For all the good that programming languages bring, there’s always some hassle, some annoying quirk or inconsistency that ruins an evening, a weekend, or even an entire fiscal year.
Alas, we developers can’t do much about it. The installed base may be too large to jettison the language that irks us. The boss may love a stack so much they refuse to hear the screams from the cubicle farms. Often, there’s not even any agreement about what might be a good replacement.
The cruel truth is that there may be no better options. We’re already using the best tools that humans can build. From Gödel and Turing, we’ve learned that logical mechanisms have sharp edges. Sure, maybe it’s our own fault, we humans, for misusing or misprogramming. But when a programming language forces our brains into weird yoga poses, it’s hard not to blame it for our discontent.
Still, understanding the limitations of different programming languages makes it easier to program around them. If we can’t permanently delete the languages from our repositories, we can try to understand and anticipate their idiosyncrasies. And besides, venting sometimes helps. Here are eight programming languages we love to hate, but also can’t live without.
C
C is a language that might better be called a “portable assembler” rather than a complete computer language. Does anyone like writing separate header files? Has anyone used the preprocessor for something elaborate without going slightly mad?
In theory, we’re supposed to be able to use the power of the pointer arithmetic to do clever feats, but does anyone risk doing more than allocating data structures? Is it even a good idea to be too clever with pointers? That’s how code breaks. If you’re able to be clever, it often requires writing a very long comment to document it, pretty much sucking up all the time you saved by being clever. Can anyone remember all the rules for writing C code to avoid adding all the possible security holes, like buffer overruns?
But we have no choice: Unix is written in C, and it runs most mobile phones and most of the cloud. Not everyone who writes code for these platforms needs to use C, but someone has to stay current with the asterisks and curly brackets, or else everything will fall apart.
Even the Unix people are starting to move away from C. In the last few years, some of the patches for the Linux kernel started appearing in Rust. The developers feel that the language’s more rigid structure will prevent some of the security holes that C developers leave behind when they’re being clever. This transition, though, will take years and we’ll probably be writing and chasing C pointers for longer than we run Cobol.
JavaScript
JavaScript’s creators tried to make something modern. It’s too bad that in their brilliance they’ve forever doomed us to a life of counting curly brackets, square brackets, and parentheses—while ensuring that they’re all properly nested, of course. Between the anonymous functions, the closures, and the JSON data structures, our pinkies get a real workout hitting those keys.
Then there are the weird details. If x is a string that holds the character for 1, then x+1 will produce the string 11 and x-1 will produce the number zero. Does anyone remember the difference between false, null, NaN, and undefined? They sound similar, but why does JavaScript have all four of them? And why don’t they behave consistently?
And then there’s the rapid change. New JavaScript often looks nothing like old JavaScript, thanks to newer features for unpacking and packing, spreading or unspreading objects and arrays of objects. The code looks like a sea of double quotes, triple quotes, double question marks, and triple dots. Remember that “=>” is an arrow that invokes a function but “>=” is a way to compare numbers. The new features are great if you love them, but the rest of us are confused and stuck juggling ECMAScript version numbers and wondering if some browser will barf when fed some version of the code.
Alas, the internet, the web, and a bazillion browsers aren’t going anywhere. Then the supersmart Node.js team came along and built a platform for running JavaScript on the server. Now, it’s one of the most popular ways to build modern, progressive web applications. Coders are celebrating the freedom of isomorphic code that runs on both the browser and the server. It doesn’t matter how much developers complain. We’ll be juggling anonymous functions and closures for decades.
PHP
PHP is not really a computer language; it's more of a tool for adding a bit of smarts to static HTML. You can store information in a database and concatenate it with static tags. There might be a few more features, but it seems like all we do with PHP is glue together strings we grab from a database.
Well, that’s how it was. Some of PHP's creators have taken all our complaints to heart and added features like a stronger type system, smarter strings, and better integration with MySQL. PHP is better for it, and it supports more elaborate codebases. All of that sounds good, but don’t get too excited about the improvements. At the same time the developers are adding new features, they’re deprecating some of the old ones. That means it’s only a matter of time before the old code stops working.
Arguing about toyish code or baby syntax isn’t worth the trouble. Between WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, most of the content on the web is delivered through PHP code. Then there’s Facebook (or Meta), which was largely written in PHP and continues to suck up a significant percentage of our time. We should just be happy that Facebook built the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), inspiring Zend to create PHP 8.2.
These new PHP engines are often twice as fast, an irresistible speed boost that will save millions in electricity and ensure we’ll all be writing PHP long into the future.
Cobol
Cobol began life in 1959 and should be obsolete by now, with its complex syntax filled with hundreds of restricted words. Yet Cobol lovers keep generating new versions, borrowing ideas from other languages, and bolting them onto a frame that’s more than 60 years old. Did you know there’s something called Cobol 2014? It includes dynamic tables, an idea that people have been trying to get into the language since 2002. And then there’s Visual Cobol 8.0 which can link your Cobol up with Java or .NET code making it easier than ever to keep your old code running and running and running alongside more modern stacks.
We may have better tools for writing business logic to manipulate databases, but no one seems to bother because it’s easier to buy a bigger computer and keep the Cobol code going. Cobol lovers point out that old software logic never wears out so why risk introducing errors by trying to update it? As I type this, there are 346 jobs listed on Dice.com with the word Cobol in them. There are Cobol jobs in insurance companies and defense contractors everywhere. Early mainframe adopters still use Cobol to get the job done. Computer scientists may recoil in horror, but as long as customers are lining up, the bosses will say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Just buy a bigger mainframe.”
R
R was developed for data science and is still used widely by data scientists, although some have switched to Python because they find R too arcane. Some traditional programmers are thrown off by the interactive nature of R, sometimes called its “scratchpad mode.” Anyone who needs to add a few numbers or compute the standard deviation of a data set can just type a few characters into R’s command prompt and get the answer immediately. R is just as much a tool you use as a programming language for building things.
The language itself can be a bit odd and confusing. Many of the commands are designed to be quick and concise, which is great if you’re juggling test tubes in the lab and asking R to compute a number on the side. Punctuation like the comma is incredibly powerful and I’ve found that the solution to my woes was adding another comma. Hours of headaches, all for the want of one of the tiniest punctuation marks.
R's syntactic mysteries and data structure challenges frustrate data scientists—and they will for years to come. The installed base of R packages and libraries is almost irresistible. The R ecosystem is broad and growing. Many of the packages are open source and ready to answer your questions or your boss’s demands with a quick graph or regression. It’s just much easier to pull out your hair figuring out the double brackets in R than it is to rewrite the endless packages in your favorite language.
Java
The virtual machine and the libraries may date from the ’90s, but Java's syntax is stuck in the 1970s when C was created. Automatic memory management seems like a big step forward until your code decides to abdicate while garbage collection takes control. Android developers exchange tips on when to politely request a garbage collection in advance to ensure that the garbage collector doesn’t start up in the middle of an important event, like a phone call to 911.