Ask Slashdot: What Are the Strangest Features of Various Programming Languages?

itwbennett writes: Every programming language has its own unique quirks, such as weird syntax, unusual functionality or non-standard implementations -- things that can cause developers new to the language, or even seasoned pros, to scratch their heads in wonder (or throw their hands up in despair). Phil Johnson has rounded up some of the strangest — from the + operator in JavaScript to the trigraphs in C and C++ and indentation level in Python. What programming language oddities cause you the most grief?"

Comments

a fucking slideshow?

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting a slideshow on Slashdot? Lame. What, was Buzzfeed not available?

Re:a fucking slideshow?

[Anrego]

I don't even bother with infoworld links any more. It'll be a bunch of slides with a sentence of text, an unrelated image, and ads everywhere (ads on the slides, ads before the slides, an add in the middle of the slideshow, and an ad at the end). Content wise, usually they find one or two interesting things, then fill the rest of the slots with stupid shit everyone already knows.

Re:a fucking slideshow?

[amicusNYCL]

That was my experience. I opened the page, clicked Next past the intro slide, saw a picture of apples and oranges, some text talking about "+" in Javascript, clicked Next again, it faded out to show an ad that I blocked, and I closed the page. Bunch of crap.

Perl: TMTOWTDI

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

I used to think that Perl's feature of "There's More Than One Way To Do It" was great until I had to start modifying and maintaining the code of other developers, (several over the years). 20+ years I've been with Perl and I gotta say that through the years this has probably caused me more frustration than anything. Python, comparatively speaking, is a dominatrix and I'm starting to enjoy "There's Only One Way To Do It".

Re:+ operator for string concat?

[TheDarkMaster]

The difference is that the "+" operator in a strong-typed language works without causing nasty surprises for you.

Re:Null Terminated Strings

[SpaghettiPattern]

I believe none of you actually programmed in C. A string terminated by \0 can be represented by a single pointer and an have any length. You can also easily let the string keep growing (until the allocated memory is finished.) That is the epitome of KISS. If you use an 8 byte character at the beginning then you are limited to a string length of 255. A structure with a length and a string pointer (or a character array) is much more complex and that would reflect in more complex library functions.

C was invented by exceptionally bright people. For a language that was primarily designed to program kernels its remarkably versatile. If you are seeking a language to write administrative applications then you should look further. COBOL back in the days or Java nowadays would suit you better. And yes, there is a difference in programming prowess between kernel / library programmers and application programmers. The latter "just" have to get the business logic going and are allowed to use every trick in the book. The former must be very concise and consider that their code will be used by a huge amount of other programs.

Re:Powershell

[nine-times]

You know, I kind of hated Powershell until I was forced to use it.

I still hate it. But then I have to write a bash script, and I run across some specific problem while writing a bash script, and find myself thinking, "This would be easier in Powershell." So that's something.

It's really not like Batch files, though. It really isn't that bad of a scripting language.