Well, I dislike both TCL and Matlab because they are kind of half-line-oriented languages. I.e. some constructs are line oriented, and some are not.

IIRC, in TCL I had to write

and I hated the need to put the '\'. I.e. I dislike the default

style and I hate the need to put '\' - not the case in C/C++/Perl.

And in Matlab I dislike lack of lexical scoping - as well as in Python.

Visual Basic 6, error handing quickly descends into goto spaghetti, no short cut boolean operators and weak typing.

R isn't that bad, but at the time I was irritated with tranformations between types and I still think it's pretty inefficient as far as allocations. Anyway, at least you can write a shell script with it and you can nest as many access operators as you want, unlike with MATLAB. I didn't appreciate R until MATLAB. MATLAB is pretty bad with the ... thing and no functions outside of a function-only file, but at least it multiplies matrices properly and has a Cholesky factorization that returns a usable matrix, unlike IDL. I guess MATLAB and IDL are tied.
Kevin Barry

HP basic.

I never thought of it as very basic.

DOS .BAT was crude but suited to its restricted environment; there was no reason for the ugliness of the latest extensions in its descendant .CMD

Can't think of anything. I even had experience programming by inputting raw octal numbers, and that was fun. IMO, a programmer should be able to adapt to anything, and if you can't do that, you have a problem. It is fine to have favorite language (that works best for *you*) or two, but if you know "worst" language, then it is possible that you simply don't understand it or don't know how to use it.

I agree with 15. I've programmed in FOCAL, which is the best language you can imagine that can be loaded from paper tape. Also FORTRAN IV, ideal for card reader input. And PDP-11 assembler, which for assembly language was very elegant. Every language in general use had some strength for its time and place. I have never used ADA, which was designed and imposed by committee, so may not fit my requirement.

I've been thinking about this off and on since yesterday when it was first posted. Originally I offered up LISP and FORTRAN. I'll remove LISP as my least favorite, because as Sergei mentioned, it is a pretty elegant language once you get past the initial bit.

No one disagrees that FORTRAN is pretty awful. But its not the worst. I belive I've finally come up with the worst.

QBASIC

Remember the Microsoft Abortion(c) that was QBASIC? Included with every version of DOS, stripped down to a crippled scripting language with 20 or so commands and no COMPILER?

I have to say that QBASIC was the worst, and most useless. Its gotta be bad when the entire command reference can fit on a single piece of paper.

Well, not quite true. I.e. Fortran IV was still ugly, but have a look at Fortran 95: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran_language_features - quite decent, with a lot of concepts to be found in many other modern languages, even "Overloading and generic interfaces"; "Pure Procedures" - pure functions, that is; pointers.

catkin beat me to my choice DOS *.bat, but I really have a small scope of experience to judge with... a basic variant or two, DOS bat, bash,C, AIML and a variant.

Most people have very little experience with Windows scripting languages, largely because they were never sophisticated enough to get much done.

I've been playing around with Power Shell scripting lately, and I dislike it a lot less than previous Windows scripting languages, largely because they incorporated some common Linux commands that behave similar to the ones you've know before.

The way they incorporated security into Power Shell boggles the mind, but hey, that's MS for you.

You're right. I had forgotten about QBasic. I got a lot more done using the DOS shell then I ever did in QBasic.
Eventually I just regarded it like the toy in the crackerjack box. It was there but not worth anything. You had to have at least Turbo Pascal on a PC to do any real programming.

Any 4gl language heavily tailored to databases, such as IBM INFORMIX.... AHHHHHH!!!!

Pretty much every shell scripting language.
Perl one for the dumpster.
CDP1802 assembler

Never had the misfortune of using cobol - its reputation preceded it so I stayed away.

At the moment:

, and people are still contributing. I think Perl is one of the most convenient languages.