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

Powershell

[Anonymous Coward]

-eq as the equality operator in Powershell is pretty odd.

Re:Powershell

[Bacon Bits]

Two reasons:

1. POSIX environments have already been done on Windows, and they universally suck. SFU/Interix is shit. Cygwin is shit. MKS Toolkit is shit. MinGW/MSYS, which does a better job than any of them, is mostly shit. Even UnxUtils, which is just binaries modified for use with the actual Windows cmd shell are mostly shit. There are so many fundamental differences of philosophy that make working with a Windows system as though it were a POSIX system fundamentally untenable. You're stuck with mostly just munging text files in a binary world.

2. Powershell is what .NET developers think Windows administrators want in a shell. That's why you're allowed to do stuff like import .NET assemblies and use essentially unmodified C# code, but there's still no native SFTP client or server.

Powershell is about 90% of what an administrator actually wants in a shell, and it's actually not that bad. Compared to cmd.exe or VBscript it's balls out fantastic. However, an administrator shouldn't need to learn about .NET objects to be able to write a script, and they shouldn't feel like there's such a fundamental separation between what the shell can do with .NET piping and what executable programs can do. There's a very real encouragement to make everything in Powershell written in and with Powershell exclusively. Like no calling of a binary to do something unless you have no other choice. The shell and the community philosophy very much discourage that... for no real reason other than it's more difficult to get a .NET object out of a binary file and manipulate it with arbitrary .NET methods. I've seen people re-implement a command line zip program with [System.IO.Compression] instead of just using 7z.exe. Why? Just so they can use .NET objects that they never do anything with.

Honestly I really love Powershell, but I wish the philosophy were geared more around getting shit done than getting shit done with .NET.

Lua[0]?

[ThisIsSaei2561]

Lua's standard is, for things like arrays, to start counting from 1. The unlearning of old habits made this a hard adjustment.