With the advancement of the programming languages, the aim has been to simplify them for the betterment of the beginners as well as the professionals. Previously, coders had to deal with low-level languages which were the most difficult to code in. Even today a few of those programming languages like Fortran, Cobol, Pascal, and others that are used for embedding firmware in the hardware. But there are more develop-friendly programming languages available like Python which are extensively used in the industry. Today, we will look at the top 5 most difficult programming languages that exist in this world.

COW –

Well, it is the undoubtedly the most difficult programming language as well as the funniest one indeed. The programming language was developed in 2003 by Sean Heber, and hence, it is outdated. The idea behind the development of COW was to experiments with diffident ideas the creator had in mind. Surprisingly, the programming language was always meant to be difficult and not just that, it was not meant to be used for any practical purpose at all. COW is based on the languages used in the Turing machine. Therefore, all the calculations that can be done on Turing machine, can be done on COW. The funniest part is that all the instructions have to be written with the keyword ‘moo’ which is the sound of a cow. If you write any other character or word, it will automatically be considered as a comment.

Intercal –

The programming language was created by Don Woods and James Lyon when they were students at Princeton University. You may as well die trying to learn the programming language and dare to code in it. The attempt was actually to make the programming language user-friendly, and therefore, the creators included keywords like Read out, Ignore, Please, Forget, and likewise. The funny thing is that if your code does not have enough Please keywords, the code will not be considered polite and it will show an error message and refuse to run. On the other hand, if you use that keyword, it will be considered excessively polite, and you cannot run it for the same reason. Therefore, if you think that you can learn any programming language from scratch and create awesome things out of it, you are welcome to try it.

Whitespace –

What more can you think of a programming language that is created as an April Fool’s joke? The programming language was released on 1st April 2003 by Edwin Brady and Chris Morris. The instructions and coding procedure made everyone think that it is meant to be a joke. But only a coder knows that it is a pain in the rear side to even think of the language. There are no keywords, and you have to use only whitespaces, tabs, and linefeeds to write your code. If you write any character, it gets ignored by the compiler. Well, it could be the most encrypted programming language in the history as only the creators can write codes in it.

Chef –

If you are a cook, you might just love the programming language. The codes appear to be some cooking recipe and the principles listed on Chef’s documentation are the funniest. Some of the principles state that program recipes should not only be right to generate output but should be easy to prepare and look delicious. Not just that, the program recipe should be tailor-made for cooks with different budgets. The keywords are all the names of the ingredients of cooking. You got to see some of the sample codes in the programming language, and you might discover the eternal source of laughter.

Brainfuck –

From the name itself, you can tell that we saved the best one for the last. It has been more than two and a half decades since the programming language was created by Urban Muller. It is more of a puzzle, and the original intention was to make a programming language where minimal lines of codes have to be written to get any output in comparison to other programming languages present at that time.

There are only 8 keywords available in the programming language for the same purpose, and it operates as an array of memory cells. So far it sounds innovative and revolutionary, but if you see the same code of Brainfuck, you will jump out of the seat. You will feel like you have been transported to the primitive time of the human creation. To write a hello world code, you have to use arithmetic symbols, and no human brain can be so superior to figure it out itself.

Apart from these, there are various other programming languages that can feature with them like Malbloge whose coding looks like a garbage or malfunction and much more. It is better not to waste your time trying to be the cool person who could code in the most difficult programming languages.

Kitty Gupta
Latest posts by Kitty Gupta (see all)