No, really, I don't want an identification division. The problem with identification division is it really puts a crimp in Perl's poetry, or in Cobalt poetry. How many poems can you start off identification division? One.

-- Larry Wall, cited in The Lighter Side of Perl Culture (Part V): Poetry

Of the over twenty programming languages I've used over the years, the two I dislike most are COBOL and PHP.

As indicated by Larry's quote above, writing poetry in COBOL is not fun. Ditto for playing golf. Though its English-like syntax should help in writing poetry, being developed by the US Department of Defense, and heavily used in business, finance and administration, puts a bit of a crimp on having fun. Having said that, Larry's quote above does appear to have provoked a COBOL poem!

grinder highlights COBOL's breathtaking verbosity in his classic A++:

use Cobol;
PROCEDURE DIVISION
ADD 1 TO A GIVING B
MOVE B TO A
[download]

When forced to use COBOL on an IBM mainframe back in the 1980s, I remember being appalled by its oppressive verbosity ... and shocked to learn that there was no such thing as a local variable!

Though I enjoyed playing golf in PHP -- due to its many quirks, inconsistencies and bugs -- I was appalled by its seemingly random, ad hoc design (as detailed in the references below).

Oh, and I also hate seeing a "small" Unix shell script grow into a 5000-line, unmaintainable monster. To avoid this, write all non-trivial scripts in Perl to begin with.

• The Lighter Side of Perl Culture (Part V): Poetry
• Unleashing the inner Pablo (COBOL Poem provoked by Larry's quote above)
• More poetry in COBOL
• Your Language Sucks (Theory.org wiki)
• PHP in contrast to Perl
• Why PHP Sucks
• The PHP Singularity
• PHP: a fractal of bad design
• The golf course looks great, my swing feels good, I like my chances (Part III)
• Should I give up Perl?
• Unix shell versus Perl