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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

Is assembly the devil's own programming language?

Assembly is too honest about what the program is doing to be the Devil's work. That would be C with undefined behavior kicking in on malicious input from the Devil's children.

Indeed. Assembly is the language of the nameless ancient horror that was there before the devil was born. The language of the devil is C and the languages of his demons are JavaScript and PHP.

Seriously? Wow. Assembler is the most beautiful, simplest language that I have ever programmed in.

O tempora, o mores...

Lisp is the most beautiful. Brainfuck is the simplest.

I miss punchcards so much BTW, I used to draw on them when I was a child...

I find Lisp very beautiful and elegant but I find assembler even more so.

i think there are way too many widely divergent CPUs for that statement to make any sense. there is 6809 assembler, 8086 assembler, 68000 assembler, etc. some of them are simple, quite a few are not.

And before Assembly there was VHDL and Verilog, and the eldritch instruments that turn them into baroque patterns of silicon that cannot be contemplated by man (well, not since the 1970s...)

I would think he would sway toward VB ;)

I mean, if we stick with the spirit of the article I think that it's even more likely to be Fortran. Seemingly interesting, accomplishes certain very specific tasks well, turns into an absolute monolithic nightmare when encountered in the wild.

Not if you plan and architect it well. BT back in the day wrote a billing system for its dialcom / telecom gold online service in mostly Fortran 77.

Apart from one module which our US colleges wrote in a completely different language (PL1/G) we only found that out when it was delivered.

And at my first job at BHRA /BHR Group our fluid dynamics simualor was written in Fortran and was well structured I certainly don't recall any major problems

No, the devil's programming language is lisp in mid-size or larger team settings. People feel so empowered individually with the language, but I doubt all those same people have spent time maintaining someone else's code. Death knell of perl, too.

No, that would be malbogue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malbolge

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