I go back to the Commodore Vic 20 days when you used to have to buy programs and type them in by hand. Commodore BASIC...ah those were the days. Looking back on it, I learned more about programming doing that than I ever did doing anything else since Commodore BASIC was just slightly different from the standard and you might have to trouble shoot bugs caused by the differences. The real pain in the ass, was typing in the Machine Language Assembler developed by Compute's Gazette. You had type in numbers of groups of three, line after line after line. I found myself drooling into the keyboard more than once during multi hour sessions. The longest I ever spent typing in a program was "Speedscript" a crude but usable word processor. That took the better part of a week. Once dos and windows took over pre-packaged software took over and since I never wanted to be a programmer anyway I just bought or downloaded whatever I wanted. I tell people about the old days and compare them to the early days of cars when you needed to be a mechanic if you were going to buy one.
While Befunge looks pretty bad, having written an interpreter in MIPS assembly for, and several programs in Brainfuck, I can tell you, it's really not that bad. Picking the worst language is a difficult task. Most have at least a few redeeming characteristics. MUMPS is one that comes to mind though, along with RPG and COBOL. BASIC isn't great either, and neither is PHP. Hmm... I'm noticing a trend... acronym-named languages suck.
I don't know anything much about programming, and less about Brainfuck, so take this for what it's worth. The problem with Brainfuck looks like it's less about the difficulty of programming and more about the difficulty of troubleshooting/debugging. Brainfuck is pretty straightforward, and working out how to perform any desired operation is just a matter of brute force once you're facile with the Brainfuck commands. Good luck, however, finding typos in anything resembling a complex Brainfuck program. I don't see how you could reliably write a reasonably complex program in Brainfuck except by first writing and debugging it in some other programming language and then using some other program to automatically translate it into Brainfuck.
Gotta go with ML and Fortran. Pascal was a joy & BASIC (except AtariBASIC) was pretty fun. 'Brainfuck'? Really? How do you put that on your Resume'? Any Resume' I got with Brainfuck listed as a skill would go straight to the trash. Fuck MATLAB! There, I said it.
Mumps are just bad as a rule Unfortunately, my programming skills are very, very limited. Anyone remember HyperCard?
