Ben Halpern

Posted on Mar 6, 2018

Which mainstream programming language has the ugliest syntax?

#discuss

Regardless of the language's usefulness, which language fails the beauty contest the worst?

Oldest comments (232)

Ryan Haber • Mar 6 '18

PHP

Oldschool-wise, I can never forgive Pascal it's := operator.

Ben Halpern • Mar 6 '18

Can you tell me more about the := operator?

eva • Mar 6 '18

In Pascal, a:=33 would assign the value 33 to variable a. The is-equal operator was just =. It was less error prone than what finally stuck, thanks to C and Java ---> = to assign values, == to compare them.

Mike • Mar 6 '18

PHP: it’s not a bad syntax, it’s just not what some people like, and they’ve formed opinionated debates over it.

Anas Ismail Khan • Mar 6 '18

I agree. There's nothing bad about the syntax. True, the language could be better. There are 99 reasons to dislike PHP but syntax is definitely not one of them.

Jeroen De Dauw • Mar 7 '18

PHP has been my main language for 10 years.

-> instead of . is rather unfortunate. Much harder to type :/

$var instead of var is also not idea if you ask me, though at least not as silly as needing to hit 3 keys.

That does not make the syntax as a whole ugly though.

Ryan Haber • Mar 7 '18

Lol. It helps. :D

Antonin J. (they/them) • Mar 7 '18 • Edited

Especially if you look at more modern PHP. I really like Laravel's code style.

For non-PHP developers, a few syntax niceties:

All variables have a $ prefix. So $post = getPost($id).
Accessing class properties (non-static) is done via an arrow: $request->has('name')
Accessing static properties is done via :: (by far my favorite). Route::get('/api/posts', function() {});

I also like PHP namespacing:

namespace Vendor\Lib\Class;

and accessing the namespace:

use Vendor\Lib\Class;

Ethan Stewart • Mar 7 '18

As someone who's used PHP in the past, all of your niceties are among the many reasons I don't care for the language 😆 to each their own though! 🤷🏻‍♂️

Antonin J. (they/them) • Mar 9 '18

Haha, I can understand that. I actually liked the namespacing so much, I wrote a babel plugin that rewrites import paths in JS to work similarly. Not EXACTLY the same, but it's very similar.

Ben Sinclair • Jun 10 '18

I really dislike PHP namespacing.

Ryan Haber • Mar 7 '18

True enough. The syntax isn't bad as in defective or overly verbose. It does look inelegant to me, though.

Károly Balogh • Mar 7 '18

I strongly disagree, with the Pascal remark, but I'm a Pascal lover, so I'm probably biased the other way. I'd say := vs. = is much better and a lot less error prone and ugly than = vs. == let alone === in some languages.

Also := was not even a Pascal invention, but much older. It comes from ALGOL actually, IIRC.

Ryan Haber • Mar 7 '18

All very fair points. I never minded Pascal as a language. Just that assignment operator.

I had forgotten it came from ALGOL.

But you agree PHP is hideous?

Károly Balogh • Mar 7 '18 • Edited

I believe there's worse than PHP, but that alone doesn't make any PHP better for sure. :)

BTW, I always think about replacing : with be and = with equal in my mind when reading Pascal code. So a:=1; is let a be equal 1. Same works with colon elsewhere, for example type definitions like var x: integer; can be read as let var x be integer; ... It makes the whole syntax quite readable for me.

But I'm not a native English speaker, so sorry if this just makes it even worse. :P

Ryan Haber • Mar 8 '18

No, it's a nice thought. It does work, as far as I can remember. Maybe it's what Pascal's creators were thinking.

MetaDave 🇪🇺 • Mar 8 '18

And there was me thinking it was from ADA ... it's like archaeology, this, just stripping layers away.

Ryan Haber • Mar 8 '18

Historical linguistics is a real discipline in natural languages. I love the analogies between natural languages and computer languages.

MetaDave 🇪🇺 • Mar 9 '18

Yes, and there's definitely a "thing" with code quality being correlated to natural readability too.

I come from an ORACLE background originally, and it would drive me insane to see people uppercasing their SQL, like it was an act of kindness to the compiler, and us humans have to suck up the inconvenience. I used to send people photos of major highway direction signs and ask "WHY DO YOU THINK WE DO NOT PUT INFORMATION THAT HAS TO BE QUICKLY ABSORBED IN UPPER CASE? Which do you find easier to read?".

I was also once instructed that all text in a BI system's reports should be in fixed pitch uppercase – got out of it by showing how wide that made every text-heavy report.

TL;DR; People are sometimes quite dumb.

Mihail Malo • Aug 20 '18

=== and !== look rad in Fira Code

MetaDave 🇪🇺 • Mar 8 '18

You might have to blame ADA for that.

PL/SQL also uses it – it is very closely related to ADA.

edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y • Mar 6 '18

A C++ variadic template, with move operations, lambdas, and static conditions, is essentially unreadable.

Eljay-Adobe • Mar 6 '18

All of C++ is a syntactical morass.

edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y • Mar 7 '18

True, but filled with little hidden gems, thus we continue to slog through it.

Cristian Pallarés • Mar 6 '18

We need a simpler syntax for C++ :)

Arthur Brainville • Mar 12 '18

Some recent addition to the language help with that. Things like "if constexpr" permit to get rid of some SFINAE, and lambdas are generally helpfull into simplifying some code.

Well, even if the syntax for lambdas is...

[&](const std::string& some_adjective){std::cout << "... a bit " << some_adjective << " sometimes ...\n";}("laborious");

(this is just an useless example of code that nobody should ever write)

;-)

Cristian Pallarés • Mar 13 '18

Indeed. +1 for using \n instead of std::eol.

Arthur Brainville • Mar 25 '18

Indeed! (You probably mean std::endl ;-))

And yes, this thing is the devil and should not be used. I'm sad so much books and courses about C++ use this thing as a "new line" character, it is not. It happens to print one before flushing.

std::cin and std::cout will synchronize themselves, you don't need to flush by hand, you just makes your program slower that it should be, and this tend to make me angry ;-)

Cristian Pallarés • Mar 25 '18

Oh yeah, I meant std::endl... haha I have read too much about LF and CRLF eol's these days

Arthur Brainville • Mar 25 '18

Remark, I wouldn't be a bad thing to have a global called "eol" or "lf" in std that doesn't flush the output. :-)

But it's really a shame that they called this thing "endl"...

Chris Bordeman • May 29 '18

We need to switch to Rust. :)

Daniel • Mar 6 '18

Ada 95 or Lisp.

I actually enjoyed Lisp's parentheses art, but still ugly.

eva • Mar 6 '18

Writing LISP with a simple editor that didn't "match" opening and closing parentheses automatically. That was fun!

Chris Bordeman • May 29 '18 • Edited

LOL I learned Ada in college, just before 95. I thought it was very elegant. Then Ada 95 tacked on OOP and ruined it.

Jason Bowen • Mar 6 '18

Java

Sergey Kislyakov • Mar 6 '18

Brainfuck.

Wesley Ameling • Mar 6 '18

ArnoldC

Dave Jacoby • Mar 6 '18

"mainstream"?

Ben Halpern • Mar 6 '18

dev.to is built with Brainfuck.

Anas Ismail Khan • Mar 6 '18

No kidding?

Sergey Kislyakov • Mar 6 '18

Open-Source it and we will see ;)

G. • Sep 6 '18

dev.to/ben/the-devto-codebase-will...

Mac Siri • Mar 6 '18

lol best answer.

Erik Nelson • Mar 6 '18 • Edited

Java's verbosity gets old pretty fast. Especially after seeing what's possible with other JVM languages.

Kotlin is a joy to use, in part because of how expressive yet succinct it is. Going back and forth between the two makes Java's flaws much more visible, unfortunately.

Meghan (she/her) • Mar 6 '18

To each his own haha, I love Java for how verbose it is and really dislike Kotlin. Operator overrides are a really neat idea but I can't get over the fun/func craze of using it instead of just saying function. Swift, Go, Rust, they all do it.

Christian Vasquez • Mar 6 '18 • Edited

I agree with you on the fun part. I've been getting more into JavaScript recently and I can see the use of the full word (function) being better for beginners overall.

Leah • Mar 7 '18

"fun is short for function"

"Oh ok"

Christian Vasquez • Mar 7 '18 • Edited

Yeah, but I still haven't seen the first person who doesn't question what fun is the first time they see it.

Sometimes being clear and short don't go hand to hand.

Meghan (she/her) • Mar 7 '18

there's a readability factor that I feel is added when you use the whole function. Especially for compiled languages, the "less characters" argument has no weight at all.

series0ne • Mar 7 '18

It’s actually a “fewer characters” argument.

Aram Bayadyan • Mar 7 '18 • Edited

Actually in javascript es6 you don't have to type any word to create a function just () => {} which is the best notation IMHO

Leah • Mar 7 '18

What's the benefit of typing out function?

There is none, it just adds more characters

Christian Vasquez • Mar 7 '18 • Edited

Then we should use f because "un" would just add a few more characters 🤔.

I think there's a fine line between short and too short.

Alain Van Hout • Mar 7 '18

There's a reason why we don't all prefer our Shakespeare or our technical documentation in SMS/text speak :).

Juho Häme • May 6 '18

Writing code Shakespeare style would be awful.

Andrew (he/him) • Nov 15 '18

f already stands for function in mathematics:

y = f(x)

Leah • Jan 23 '19

it's just what you start with, the next one would be g(x)

Márton Kardos • Mar 7 '18

Rust goes like: Fn... And I don't think there's anything wrong with writing instead of function, with good syntax highlighting there's barely a difference. I don't think code becomes any more readable by writing longer words. And Java's verbosity doesn't increase the readability at all. "final public static void" Btw you don't even have a function keyword in Java and nobody tends to make a problem of it.

Matti • Feb 22 '20

the modifiers are necessary to differentiate non-final private/protected non-static methods with a return type ... it makes total sense 😅

Tobias Salzmann • Mar 6 '18

Java Syntax has the weird ability to direct the attention to the less important parts of the code first.

Dave Jacoby • Mar 6 '18

Ugliest I ever dealt with is BASIC. Not Visual Basic from MS, but old-school 20 GOTO 10 BASIC.

But that was 30 years ago and I never did it for pay.

Kasey Speakman • Mar 6 '18 • Edited

I always hate dealing with our VB code base. You thought parenthesis and curly braces were bad, what about a whole statement to terminate a block: End If End Case End For.

Then there is having to continue a multi-line statement with an ending underscore _.

If condition1 And condition2 _
   And condition3 Then

End If

Then there's Sub vs Func keywords. If I use Sub then later decide I need to return a value, I have to change the keyword to Func in order to do so or it will not compile.

There are probably more I'm not thinking of.

Jason C. McDonald • Mar 6 '18

VB.net was my first language, and I have a special hatred of it. (What sort of lunatic thought Dim made even the SLIGHTEST bit of sense for initializing a variable???)

Anas Ismail Khan • Mar 6 '18

HAHAHAHA That's literally the first thing all VB.net developers, who generally tend to hate VB.net, say.

Even I was like "Hey what's this Dim.. oh wait, that's a variable being declared."

Kasey Speakman • Mar 6 '18

I believe Dim is short for dimension. Not sure why the syntax is so array-focused.

Dian Fay • Mar 7 '18

Technically a scalar value is just a special case where an array only has one dimension and one element... I remember it from QBasic in the 90s and apparently it goes back to Fortran.

Jason C. McDonald • Mar 7 '18 • Edited

True point. Although. technically declaring a value is also called instantiation, but that doesn't make Instant a good keyword for declaring a variable. :-P

Jason Gade • Mar 13 '18

Dim goes back to VB's BASIC roots. You didn't have to declare most scalar variables, but you had to use 'Dim' to 'Dim'ension arrays.

In some dialects, strings were treated as scalars and didn't require declaration, but other dialects required you to 'Dim' them as arrays.

As was mentioned, it may even go further back to FORTRAN, but that's a bit before my time.

/grognard hat off.

Daniel Lo Nigro • Mar 12 '18

Be glad ReDim Preserve isn't a thing any more :P

Chris Bordeman • May 29 '18

DIM was short for dimension. In early BASIC forms, it was to declare an array by indicating its size. Later it was repurposed to do any sort of declaration.

Dave Jacoby • Mar 7 '18

Back in the day, I worked on a VB Embedded program but didn't have the devices yet so worked in VB 6. All well before .NET.

When I started to port it over, I found that VB differed. Like, VBe and VB6 had incompatible for loops. Or maybe while. I didn't like VB much either way, but it worked. It's the incompatibility that's ugly to me.

.NET ftw

Ryan Haber • Mar 8 '18

I suddenly remembered my very first programming language back in 1989 (?). GW-BASIC. And line numbers.

😐

Chris Bordeman • May 29 '18

GW-BASIC was my very first language, too! :D

Meghan (she/her) • Mar 6 '18

For as many under-the-hood advancements they have when I first came across Go and Rust I denounced them at first because of how ugly they are.

Dan Fockler • Mar 6 '18

With Rust's lifetimes and it's type system you sometimes end up with pretty crazy type signatures. RefCell<Rc<'a &Mutex>>> mostly that's if you are trying to write concurrent code though.

Nested Software • Mar 7 '18 • Edited

Yeah, Rust is awful in my opinion! I mean, if you value some of the compiler guarantees it offers, I guess that's fair enough, but it seems more like an academic exercise to me than a usable programming language. One should not have to struggle with a language just to get frequently-used and standard types of logic working.

Ethan Stewart • Mar 6 '18

I get put off by the parenthetical soup that Lisp can sometimes become, but I've never encountered a syntax I hated more than Objective-C. Had to dig in some old iOS code in Obj-C at a previous job for an app we were planning to build, it made me want to tear my eyes out

eronaeon • Mar 6 '18

Golang

Dian Fay • Mar 6 '18

I still love it, chunky retro capitalization and awkward indentation and all, but even I have to admit that the inner elegance of a well-designed SQL query only shines through sometimes.