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The Stupidest Invention In The History of Programming Languages

November 1st, 2007 by Juuso Hietalahti
Posted in Fun Stuff, Game Development

In programming, the award of the stupidest inventions goes to use of characters == and =. (setting value and comparing whether values are equal).

Just think about it. There are countless errors being made because somebody wrote IF (a=b) instead of IF (a==b). That error is really difficult to trace and it gives no compiling errors. (Okay, some programs don’t use ==, but there are many languages that do)

My rough estimation is that because somebody started using == several decades ago, it has already cost billions of dollars today (I base these estimates on average hourly salaries that’s wasted on debugging - and on the results of the dice throw I just had).

Why couldn’t they use something else… like < - symbol or something to “set value”.

Wouldn’t it make a lot of sense?

a < - b

That looks like “b value is put to a”.

I wonder why nobody asked me when programming languages were invented.

Update: After some thinking, symbol ¤ could be used as well. Check out the discussion at the forums and give your suggestion.

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4 Responses to “The Stupidest Invention In The History of Programming Languages”

  1. www.gamesandgames.info » The Stupidest Invention In The History of Programming Languages Says:
    November 2nd, 2007 at 1:15 pm

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  2. Videogame Biscuit » The dumbest thing in programming languages Says:
    November 2nd, 2007 at 1:33 pm

    [...] to Game Producer, the worst invention ever when it comes to programming languages are “==” and [...]

  3. onlinehg » Blog Archiv » The Stupidest Invention In The History of Programming Languages Says:
    November 6th, 2007 at 6:48 am

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  4. The Stupidest Invention In The History of Programming Languages Says:
    December 6th, 2007 at 12:18 am

    [...] and Aspiring Game Developers            The Stupidest Invention In The History of Programming Languages In programming, the award of the stupidest inventions goes to use of characters == and =. (setting [...]