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Can you name the Programming Language if You Know The Creators?
- bockris 16y ago17/19. I didn't know groovy or scala.
- aidenn0 16y agoI can't believe I missed basic and javascript! I'm banging my head against the wall thinking "I know the name Brendan Eich, but where?"
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- malkarouri 16y agoAlmost same here. I missed PHP, JavaScript and Groovy. PHP and Groovy were off my radar but I had the same feeling about Eich. I haven't missed Basic just because of the year (1964).
- jimbokun 16y ago18/19 can't believe I missed BASIC! Should have been process of elimination of programming languages I've heard of at that point. Most I got from the creators, managed to narrow down the others based on the year.
- DannoHung 16y agoSame here, I was guessing on a couple of the other ones though. I was thinking that it was Algol or Simula or one of the other ones that is super important in terms of influence but isn't used at all any longer.
- geophile 16y ago17/19 - missed javascript and groovy.
- kunjaan 16y agoMissed Groovy. No regrets.
- superrad 16y agoApart from a few the actual years of creation helped me more than the names of the creators.
- bl4k 16y agoanybody else put 'emacs' for Guy Steele?
- batasrki 16y ago15/19, missed Groovy (also no regrets), BASIC, COBOL and Ada Lovelace (put Babbage)
- tyweir 16y agoSame, missed basic, cobol, scheme and JS. :(
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- joshes 16y ago17/19. Missed Erlang and Groovy. The ones which came to me quickest upon seeing the name(s) were Python, Lisp, C, Java, C++ and Go (because of the year). The one which was the hardest to recall was Scala. And the bonus was quick to memory, too.
- cstuder 16y agoScala was easy for people like me who took a compiler design class given by Odersky at EPFL. We actually wrote a compiler for a simplified version of Scala. I would have never thought to see that language again after university. (That was about 6 or 7 years ago.)
- kingkilr 16y ago14/19, missed BASIC, C#, Groovy, Scala, and Ada Lovelace.
- AndrewO 16y agoI feel like I cheated on BASIC: I didn't know the creators, but it was the only big one from that era I didn't have yet.
- pluies 16y ago12/19. Oh well, at least I had Ada Lovelace. :)
- babo 16y ago18/19 groovy was out of my radar.
- mfukar 16y agoI got 4.
- cgrubb 16y agoGrace Hopper invented FLOW-MATIC. She wasn't even on the COBOL design committee. If I were to choose a single inventor for Scheme, I would have chosen Sussman, not Steele.
- nene 16y agoHmmm... I don't know much about COBOL, but Wikipedia tells me that she wrote the initial specification of the language, and given that it doesn't look to me as such a big stretch to name her at least as one of the main inventors of the language. Although it might be the case that after the committee there wasn't much left of the initial spec. But as I sayd, I hardly know anything about COBOL.
- cgrubb 16y agoWikipedia's attribution of the work that took place in late 1959 on COBOL to Grace Hopper is incorrect. Note that it was made anonymously by someone who was fixing obvious vandalism. See http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=COBOL&action=historysubmit&diff=283228831&oldid=283200503 I will summarize what I think is the correct story. I have "The Early History of COBOL" by Jean Sammet, 1978, which can be downloaded from http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=808378 http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=808378 for $15. Sammet was on the short-range design committee which did the work that Wikipedia mentions occurring in late 1959. I also have a photocopy of the April 1960 CODASYL report on COBOL which I acquired from the Charles Babbage Institute. There was a meeting of various people at the University of Pennsylvania in April 1959. They thought a "machine independent" language for data processing could and should be developed and they suggested that the Department of Defense lead the effort. In May 1959 there was a meeting at the Pentagon which outlined high level goals for the language. It also said that the existing languages FLOW-MATIC and AIMACO as well as the specified but unimplemented language COMTRAN should be studied to determine what is wrong and right with them. The May 1959 meeting also established a short-range committee, an intermediate-range committee, and a long-range committee to develop the language. The long-range committee would never actually meet. There was also an executive committee for coordinating the other committees. Grace Hopper was appointed as an advisor to the executive committee, but the executive committee was political in nature and wasn't involved in design. Most of the design work for COBOL was done by the short-range committee, which met from June through December 1959. These people served on the short-range committee: Col. Alfred Asch, Robert Barton, Howard Bromberg, William Carter, Ben Cheydleur, Miss Deborah Davidson, Norman Discount, William Finley, Charles Gaudette, Roy Goldfinger, Dan Goldstein, Mrs. Mary K. Hawes, Duane Hedges, Mrs. Frances E. Holberton, Miss Sue Knapp, Karl Kozarsky, Roy Nutt, William Logan, Rex McWilliams, Vernon Reeves, Gerald Rosenkrantz, Miss Jean E. Sammet, William Seldon, Edward Somers, Mrs. Nora Taylor, Miss Gertrude Tierney, Capt. Erwin Vernon, J..H. Wegstein (Chairman) After the short-range committee dissolved, work was carried on by the intermediate-range committee at a slower pace. The following individuals are mentioned as participating in the intermediate-range committee (though Sammet thinks this list may be incomplete): A. Eugene Smith (Chairman), Lester Calkins, Gregory Dillon, Roy Goldfinger, Jack Jones, William Keating, Colonel Gerald Lerner, Robert Rossheim As for the influence of FLOW-MATIC on COBOL, I am not aware of any FLOW-MATIC manuals that are available online, unfortunately. Sammet's article lists 5 influences of FLOW-MATIC on COBOL, however. It also lists 6 influences of COMTRAN on COBOL. Sammet says the FLOW-MATIC influences are 1) It worked! 2) Full data-names unlike FORTRAN (though limited to 12 characters in length) 3) It used full English words for commands 4) It used less than a full machine world for each data item. 5) It separated data description and commands.
- weej 16y agoI feel ashamed that I didn't realize Guy Steel did Scheme nor that he is the current Chairman of Common Lisp. Go figure. Anything Lisp related just immediately makes me think of McCarthy.
- radioactive21 16y agoI only got three, coicidently all "C". C, C++ and C#. Dont ask me why I know those three right away but struggle with the rest.
- khingebjerg 16y agoI thought James Strachan was the creator of Groovy.
- jallmann 16y agoMissed groovy, scala and basic. Actually surprised I missed the latter, but then again I never sat down and thought, "who invented basic?"
- sb 16y agoMissed Groovy... I would like to see other very important people on this list, e.g., where is Niklaus Wirth? or Alain Colmeraurer? or Chuck Moore?
- las3rjock 16y ago15/19; missed JavaScript, Groovy, Scala, and Erlang.
- rayvega 16y agoGroovy and Scala but no Clojure?
- baddox 16y agoYeah, and I kept guessing Clojure on all the ones from the 2000s that I didn't know.
- dheerosaur 16y agoYeah, I was looking for Rich Hickey after answering the obvious and popular ones.
- nickik 16y ago14/19 How the hell did I get perl from larry wall? Never heard about those the creaters of php, Groovy or basic.
- acangiano 16y ago19/19, but I struggled a bit with the Basic one.
- ralphc 16y agoSame here.
- duck 16y agoA little more info on Ada (which I missed): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace
- danieldk 16y ago16/19, missed Javascript, COBOL, and Groovy.
- l0nwlf 16y agoScore:9. Consolation points: Did BASIC and Ada which many seemed to miss. Old memories refreshed, LOGO followed by BASIC. When I first read about C, I wondered how things ever worked without 'goto'. What the hell is this thing known as recursion. :)
- mahmud 16y agoDid BASIC and Ada which many seemed to miss There was no Ada in the list. You couldn't list Ada's authorship and still keep the entry-box above the fold.
- phr 16y ago16/19: No surprise that I missed php and groovy, but I should have guessed fortran. I read somewhere that Backus was involved in the early stages of the functional programming language movement, and got sidetracked by that. He is also the B in BNF, of course.
- bluesmoon 16y ago14/19. Got many from the names, but a few I could guess just from the year.
- daeken 16y ago15/19. Missed JS (wow), Groovy, BASIC, and Erlang. That was a bit harder than I thought it'd be, honestly.
- loup-vaillant 16y agoSigh, I see no language with type inference. Nor any concatenative one. Nor any non-strict one. So unfair.
- frou_dh 16y agoC#'s `var` too weaksauce?
- loup-vaillant 16y agoWhen I said "type inference", I actually had system F in mind. And I didn't see ML (not even F#), nor Haskell, nor Miranda, nor Clean… So yes, `var` is too weaksauce.
- Locke1689 16y agoYeah I was searching for Haskell or ML.
- mindstab 16y agoNo smalltalk or erlang but a question about ada and not actually the language?
- andywood 16y ago15/19, but only because I wrote the back-end for this app: http://flashcards.educationlabs.com/#/Play/?deckid=0 http://flashcards.educationlabs.com/#/Play/?deckid=0 and the Language Creators deck was the very first test deck I made early in development. I'm very impressed with those who actually knew all of them!
- Groxx 16y ago3. Bonus (how many didn't get this one?), Perl (everything Perl mentions Larry), and Ruby (because his name is Japanese). Huzzah!
- ohashi 16y agoI got the bonus, I didn't get many others besides Perl, C++ and a couple others
- futuremint 16y agoGot em all except BASIC, Groovy, Scala, C# & Fortran. Not very interested in those languages anyway. I would have liked to see Haskell & Smalltalk on there. Apparently I do as much reading _about_ programming languages as I do _of_ them!
- ygd 16y agoTip: use *'s for italics, not _'s.
- s-phi-nl 16y agoOne they did not ask: Alan Kay
- jpr 16y agoOr Niklaus Wirth: http://www.sporcle.com/games/supreddit/prog_lang_wirth http://www.sporcle.com/games/supreddit/prog_lang_wirth
- MrMan 16y ago13. got all the old langs and the bonus. Missed Scala and Php, oh well...
- victzh 16y ago16/19, 2 minutes, got bonus for Ada, missed Groovy, PHP, and (sigh!) Erlang.
- StudyAnimal 16y agoGot 17/19. I did not get Rasmus Lerdorf PHP. I also did not get the Ada Lovelace one, but I should have, I just couldn't recall it.