Not to be too light about this serious topic but anything in COBOL. But that is what I said before I had to program in RPG III for about a year then discovered

Not to be too light about this serious topic but anything in COBOL. But that is what I said before I had to program in RPG III for about a year then discovered COBOL was not so bad. But then what are you going to do on an IBM system 34. Also I will never again write a furniture store inventory and accounts receivable program in Altair Basic. Incidentally not many of you know that Altair Basic was written using a BSO 8085 emulator running on a PDP 10 somewhere near Harvard. Possibly unlicensed. Which is a cool idea--if you can't lay your hands on the target hardware, write an emulator for it while you wait. I actually did that for a totally obscure bit of hardware while writing a compiler back end for it. I think it was a flight simulator system. Admittedly these are more personal than ethical. But isn't there sort of a connection between ethics and a sense of proper design? [edit typo]