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Show HN: 15-question language identification quiz
- ammon 9y agoWe (Triplebyte) actually tested a while ago whether identifying languages was predictive as an interview question (we thought it might predict general experience / exposure to lots of code). It was not predictive of anything. So this quiz is just for fun!
- krat0sprakhar 9y agoCame here just to confirm this. I got all right but it doesn't seem to be valid test for hiring. Fun quiz! :)
- ammon 9y agoYup, it's not a test for hiring
- shubb 9y agoCan confirm. I'm a terrible programmer but got 100%. I guess it selects for people with very unfocused careers and no real specialism.
- throwanem 9y agoOne could as easily argue that it selects for people who closely follow Hacker News - I got 15/15 too, but only because I'd previously seen several of the more esoteric languages mentioned here.
- sinistersnare 9y agoIt is worded opposite of what you say: > You're in the top 3% of engineers! (We should know, we've interviewed thousands.) We can totally help you get a job if you're interested. It is worded as if scoring well in this is an accurate predictor of engineering skill.
- a3n 9y agoIt may be an accurate predictor of who will respond to ads.
- dtft 9y ago> Just for fun ...or to retarget engineers on FB and other channels :)
- dotancohen 9y agoIt seems that some of the same questions were difficult or tricky for many people, i.e. the Kotlin question or the Lisp question (which were the two that I missed as well). It would be great to see the stats on this one. Thanks!
- dotancohen 9y agoIt seems that some of the same questions were difficult or tricky for many people, i.e. the Kotlin question or the Lisp question (which were the two that I missed as well). It would be great to see the stats on this one. Thanks!
- vortico 9y agoHappened to get all of them, but it was getting harder at the end! Was C, C++, Java, Python or included because the quiz would have been too easy?
- bryanlarsen 9y agoI thought the end was easier than the middle -- the languages there were older and more obscure to a 2017 audience, but that also generally made them much more distinctive.
- krallja 9y agoThe questions are selected in a random order from a larger set, so nobody likely saw the same questions or order as you.
- jscott313 9y agoNope, they're always in the same order. Not sure why you'd guess otherwise and state it as fact.
- krallja 9y agoMe either. And now I can't delete my stupidity, heh.
- Sohcahtoa82 9y agoWhat evidence do you have of this? Judging by other comments, it's pretty clear everyone got the same questions in the same order.
- krallja 9y agoAbsolutely nothing. I have no idea why I wrote that.
- ynniv 9y agoThat must be top 3% for a large value of 3, or perhaps a small value of 100. How's the HN traffic doing? ;-)
- throwaway2016a 9y agoGot 14/15 but I have a feeling it was only because I made the assumption I would not see the same language twice. Without that assumption a few were toss ups for me. Of all the languages on there the only one in that set I had never used / seen at all is Kotin and that's the one I got wrong. Several of them were mandatory for me to learn in college but I haven't seen since. (looking at you, Prolog and Verilog... Verilog is useful but I don't do hardware dev)
- SilasX 9y agoGot 14/15 because I couldn't tell Emacs Lisp from Clojure. Argh ...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- endgame 9y agoThe [ ] around the args are the giveaway.
- dvcrn 9y agodefn vs defun :) I remembered it somehow as "clojure doesn't allow you to define fun"
- nameless912 9y agoLol, I should print this out on a poster and give it to That One Clojure Guy(tm) at work.
- QuercusMax 9y agoMissed this as well. I should have guessed Clojure because it's a language people actually might use. All I could tell is it's some kind of Lisp.
- yellowapple 9y agoI also missed Kotlin. A lot of them could be inferred from what the code is doing. For example, PHP and Perl are sometimes really hard to distinguish, but I was able to get PHP right by deciding that "this ain't what a Perl hacker would write". Same with Ada v. VHDL.
- pmontra 9y ago14/15. I guessed wrong between Piet and GLSL which I never heard about. How many possible questions are there?
- khedoros1 9y agoPiet's an esoteric, and GLSL is OpenGL's Shader Language. GLSL looks kind of C-like, while Piet looks like Mondrian paintings (for many programs, anyhow).
- ronald_raygun 9y agoYeah, I got that problem because I knew who Piet Mondrian was, so I took an educated guess.
- ammon 9y agoYeah, Piet's a curveball! It's a pretty cool (esoteric, totally useless) language however.
- rwj 9y agoIf I hadn't read an article on esolangs last week, I would have missed Piet.
- jonesetc 9y agoThere are only 15, the quiz is static.
- viach 9y agoSo the scheme is I answer questions in order to get my ego higher, you bribe me with "you are top n", I leave my CV?
- compumike 9y ago(Note: I work at Triplebyte.) No CVs -- we skip resumes and cover letters, and match engineers to companies (bypassing recruiter and resume screens) based on demonstrated skills.
- monocasa 9y agoDemonstrated how?
- nameless912 9y agoThey have you take a quiz and (maybe) do an interview with one of their partner companies. FWIW I took the quiz and it was actually one of the better "fill out this survey and we'll see if we want to hire you"'s that I've ever seen: finding subtle-ish errors in code, demonstrating more than beginner knowledge in a couple of languages, and a pretty solid set of design questions. I didn't feel out of my league, but I also didn't feel like my intelligence was insulted.
- pklausler 9y agoDamn, I miss APL.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- acheron 9y agoStupidly, I missed Ruby/Python from going too quickly right at the beginning. Then missed Ada/VHDL from never having heard of VHDL, and I thought "oh, looks like Ada." Anyway, fun stuff. I laughed when Piet came up.
- nvr219 9y agoI am not a programmer other than one visual basic course I took in college. My score: "You got 8 out of 15 right You're in the top 50% of engineers. Can your friends beat you? Share your score and challenge them to do better!"
- amyjess 9y ago13/15 One was because I got two LISPs mixed up with each other, the other because it was in a language I didn't recognize (Piet) and there were two languages I didn't know anything about as options (GLSL was the other).
- placebo 9y agosame score, same reasons :)
- lojack 9y agoInterestingly enough, question 5 is actually syntactically correct Perl, but not PHP.
- girvo 9y ago> syntactically correct Perl Not a high bar to clear, mind you ;)
- max-m 9y agoWell, it is correct PHP as it is missing an opening "<?php" tag. Therefore the interpreter skips this part and prints it out. :D When interpreting as PHP however if(isset($_SESSION['uid'])) header("Location: reg"); } is either missing an opening bracket or has got one too many closing brackets.
- _raoulcousins 9y ago14/15. I basically only program Python, but I guessed based on vague stereotypes of different languages. The wrong one was guessing Java for C#.
- sleepychu 9y agoThat's a pretty fair toss-up if you're not familiar with either.
- QuercusMax 9y agoBiggest giveaway (as a lifelong Java programmer who's probably only written about 100 lines of C#, ever) is that C# Likes To Capitalize Freaking Everything. Java typically only capitalizes Types, but C# capitalizes Method Names as well. It's like it was created by somebody who either likes German, or Olde-Timey English Writing.
- wambotron 9y agoI got 11 of 15, but I can only write competently in maybe 4 of them (JS, Java, Python, PHP).
- rpeden 9y ago15/15, not that it matters. I guess all those years of reading about languages on HN and trying out languages even when I had no real use for them was good for something, at least. :)
- ivrrimum 9y ago10/15
- jadell 9y ago11/15 A few I missed because I didn't know enough to tell them apart (eg Kotlin/Swift.) Others were process of elimination or a straight up guess. And I didn't even know there was an abstract visual programming language!
- MichaelBurge 9y ago> Just as the ++ in the name C++ is intended to imply that C++ is a step above C, the # in the name C# is intended to resemble two ++ operators stacked on each other, indicating that C# is a step above C++. I've sort of followed C# since it was released, and never realized this.
- boondaburrah 9y agoI recall C# being a musical reference (a higher note than c), which is why it's pronounced C-sharp and not say, c-pound. I would occasionally call it Db (D-flat) to be an arse. I'm not sure if there was a formalized reasoning behind the name or if what I heard was just a rationalisation.
- toolslive 9y agoa complete arse would reply that Db and C# are not the same thing.
- ajeet_dhaliwal 9y agoSurprised how the ones I'm familiar with jump out instantaneously, only got 10/15 but should have got 11, silly mistake confusing ruby and python. Hadn't even heard of some of the ones at the end.
- Osmium 9y agoPerhaps this should be a 'poll' post so people can vote for their results? (9/15)
- nobleach 9y agoAhhhhhh! APL and Piet I didn't feel bad about (as I have never seen either) But VHDL vs Ada! Bad miss on my part. 12/15 is not too bad I guess....
- BenjiWiebe 9y agoAPL and Piet I got right. Instead I missed the newer obvious ones.. Clojure, Kotlin, Rust.
- bonzini 9y agoThe missing font is the giveaway for APL!
- hyperpape 9y agoIt's a bit of a giveaway that R included domain specific terminology: otherwise it would've been hopeless for me. Maybe the same for VHDL, but I know so little about it that I don't even know if you could write code without domain specific elements.
- DonaldFisk 9y ago14/15. Confused Swift and Objective C.
- still_grokking 9y agoToo easy (15/15). Had only once to look a second time at the code snippet (elisp vs. clojure, but there were [] around the param, that made it clear). Would be more fun if they would implement the same code snippet in different (but maybe quite similar) languages and one would have to label the (lets say six for an interesting difficulty level) snippets.
- emersonrsantos 9y agoDo one with only assembly languages and we have to guess the architecture.
- nameless912 9y agoIt's all `mov` instructions. Go.
- hghmn 9y agoI know this is intended as just a fun test, but the highlight.js library used on these pages adds the language name as part of the class name on the code block...
- noncoml 9y ago13 out of 15 (No idea bout VHDL and Piet)
- tluyben2 9y agoWrote code in all but Piet, so knew it was not glsl. I must spend way too much time behind a computer as i also knew all besides Piet even if it was not multiple choice :) I do think it should be harder; like when you get a lesser known language, also add the choice for others; APL + K + J for instance, or worse (for many) K or J showing either. C vs C++ vs D. Prolog vs Haskell vs Ocaml. Curveball there could be something like Mercury. Haskell vs Purescript.
- timwaagh 9y agoit was a fun test. i got like 13/15. not too bad i think considering the people who are on this site are making mistakes as well. maybe i deserve a higher salary?
- yakshaving_jgt 9y agoI got 12/15 initially. Then I followed the link to retry the test, and somehow got 15/15. It's amazing how quickly you can progress as an engineer.
- asadlionpk 9y agoMy startup provides online compiler service for 20+ languages[0] so my work involves testing every language frequently. So this was easy for me. [0] https://codepad.remoteinterview.io https://codepad.remoteinterview.io
- rvense 9y agoAll fun and games till the plug at the end...
- optikals 9y agoSmart! Enjoy it so much!
- vram22 9y agoJust did it, and got 14/15. But see below. Saw this thread yesterday and at first did not feel like taking the quiz (because I thought I would not do well, also because I didn't think it was too interesting). But today read about half of this thread again. Then felt motivated to take the quiz (just for fun). Was not expecting more than say 8/15. Surprised to see I got 14/15 (but in top 3% of engineers -- definitely not :). It was definitely partly due to reading some of this thread first, else I would never have been able to figure out the Ada/VHDL question (at least just by guessing / logic / prior knowledge), even less the Piet one (since had never heard of it - at least had heard of Ada and VHDL). I guess the result was also partly due to being interested in programming languages right from the start of my career, and having at least read a little about many, and having dabbled in some (apart from the ones I worked in for non-trivial periods). Anyway - somewhat interesting quiz idea.
- vram22 9y agoBTW, what is the reason for the Piet question not showing any code or image (until you answer the question)? Is it somehow related to how the language works, or some feature of it?
- xorraxrax 9y agoI got 14/15 in the language quiz and after completing the full programming test, I was told I did exceptionally well (though I suspect that's what they say to all the boys) and was invited to schedule a Google Hangouts technical interview. However, at some point along the way, I was automatically logged-in as "John Baker", a (presumably fictional) US citizen with a throwaway email address looking for work in San Francisco. When I tried to edit the profile, I was told that they only work with companies hiring in SF and NY. Thanks for wasting my time, Triplebyte.