8 ms·
What's That Programming Language?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- deletes 13y agoI can only recognize a couple of popular languages. I doubt my result will get any better in the future and i think that is a good thing.
- rheide 13y agoThis is quite neat. Btw, this breaks with the Https everywhere extension.
- adamb0mb1 13y agoGood catch. I was about to just give up after feeling kind of stupid.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- etherealG 13y agowow, that's quite hard :)
- the_watcher 13y agoWow this is hard. Wish there was a level option (beginner, intermediate, advanced or something). I have never heard of Pike or Whenever, plus never seen Algol 8 or APL. I spent ten minutes trying to find one that I recognized.
- cgtyoder 13y agoIt should be "hard." If you know anywhere near all of them, that probably means you've dabbled in lots of things but never really any one in depth. (Or, you literally do nothing else in your life but code.)
- the_watcher 13y agoNot complaining that it can get this hard. But for someone who wants to play but goes 20+ without hitting a language you have seen or heard of, it would be nice to be able to dial down the difficulty. Maybe something based on most popular programming languages (beginner only takes top 20-50 or something?)
- CatMtKing 13y agoI think it's great: you get to see all these obscure languages and how similar they are to languages you do know.
- mikeash 13y agoIt means you've dabbled in lots of things, sure, but how does that imply you've never done one in depth? It is not that time-consuming to become familiar with the basics of many different programming languages.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Shivetya 13y agoYou have to guess right for it to go on, otherwise forfeit. A lot of similar looking languages easily tripped me up, I found I had to pay much closer attention to some of the definition sections to differentiate
- afandian 13y ago(I deleted my comment because clicking the big obvious question mark answered my questions. Doesn't mean I didn't find it difficult to use though.)
- lambda_cube 13y agoI know, I had trouble with that as well, but then I read the explanations you get if you click the question mark in the upper right corner. I will try my own explanation here. Type your answer in the box, if you type 2 or more characters, there will be an auto complete list of matches. If nothing happens when you choose an answer, then it's wrong. When you choose the right answer, it will immediately switch to the next question. If you don't know the answer you can click Forfeit or press Esc. To get rid of the correct answer that pops up when you do so and go to the next question, you have to press Esc (I didn't find a way to go to the next answer just by clicking with the mouse).
- 14113 13y agoThe question mark doesn't even work for me (chrome linux), and no code is shown. [EDIT] My mistake, all you have to do is turn off https everywhere, or reload using http. Frustrating, but not 100% broken...
- brownty 13y agoThe score thing seems to be broken though. Clicking on forfeit doesn't seem to affect it
- dlhavema 13y agoclicking on forfeit gets you the answer ( which is a shortcut for hitting "ESC" ) but it looks like you can only use Escape to go to the next question. pretty cool quiz, i definitely don't know hardly any of these...
- ccross59 13y agoAh, thanks! The help says to click again to go to the next one, but that doesn't seem to actually work. Edit: ahh, it does work, but the first time I did it the red bar completely covered the forfeit link. Subsequent times it's been above and fine.
- quchen 13y agoHalf of them look like C with one additional keyword!
- perlgeek 13y agoAnd the other half looks like Lisp :-)
- finnw 13y agoThose are the ones that took me the longest. There are so many minor variations of C/Java/Javascript/Lisp that it takes a while to figure out which one you are looking at. It's the languages with very distinctive features that can be guessed quickly (assuming you have seen them before) e.g. cobol, erlang & also joke languages like intercal, brainfuck, chef etc.
- jakobe 13y agoUnfortunately this doesn't work in mobile Safari...
- Silhouette 13y agoNor in Firefox here, FWIW. Pity, it might have been fun.
- jetti 13y agoClick on the question mark. I'm running firefox and it works...just know what you have to do
- Silhouette 13y agoI did click the question mark. It was the only thing on the page that appeared to do anything other than the auto-completion mechanism for the answer field.
- bencoder 13y agoturn off https everywhere
- Silhouette 13y agoI'm not running HTTPS Everywhere.
- lambda_cube 13y agoIt probably does, it's just an unintuitive interface. Read the explanation on the page by clicking the question mark (or read my explanation here on HN in response to the now deleted comment).
- stonemetal 13y agoSome sort of feedback other than yes|no would be nice. I guessed visual basic for basic, and APL for J. I realize that is a lot of work above and beyond your MVP here, so it probably won't happen. Cool site though, it was fun to play with.
- tomphoolery 13y agoWon't let me answer questions (on Chrome 29.0.1547.62 for Mac OS X 10.8.4)... edit: Oh never mind, this is just a shitty user experience. Sorry for the misunderstanding, folks.
- canthonytucci 13y agoI think shitty is a bit strong. Unusual, but there's a big '?' to click on that tells you how to use it. Once you've read that it's possible && easy to use without ever moving you hands to the mouse again.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jlarocco 13y agoThat page is really hard to use. Some times the guessing works, some times it doesn't. There's no feedback whether it's working or not. Hitting forfeit brings up a red box that covers the input field and the forfeit button. It would have been more intuitive and less work on their part to have "guess" and "forfeit" buttons.
- tieTYT 13y agoYeah, if you click that "?" image on the upper right, it explains how it works. Most unusual UI I've ever seen. That text field should just have a button called "submit". That would be the most obvious thing to do.
- adrusi 13y agoIt's unusual, but really quick to use with just the keyboard once you get used to it. And the people who are going to do well know how to adjust to new ways of thinking that get certain things done better anyway :P
- crististm 13y agoLooks like a lot of people are complaining about the bad user interface which seems too clever for its own good. But what do they know? The emperor is naked, man!
- TheEmperor 13y agoAt the moment, no.
- MichaelGG 13y agoIt is also broken on TLS. But to be fair, the ? text says " If it seems borked, your guess is wrong. "
- draven 13y agoOnly 50%... Some language syntax are too similar (eg scheme and racket) so you need to know the libraries as well.
- VLM 13y agoGoes the other way too. I misidentified Fortran of all things because their dialect is far too new compared to what I remember (more than) a quarter century ago.
- tzs 13y ago15/44. Around 70% of the ones I got were languages I have never used, which seems kind of odd.
- thinkdo 13y agoAfter some recent hours spent banging my head against a wall, the Chef language example amuses me greatly :)
- vixen99 13y agoAddicted to nigh-on instant gratification, I gave up waiting. Too slow, sorry!
- dccoolgai 13y agoThanks - this was fun, I bookmarked it. Interesting to see some languages I had not been aware of before (Befunge and haXe were two of the most interesting...don't know if I would ever actually use them, but it was cool to see.) I will definitely consult this next time I find myself asking which language I should dabble with next.
- talles 13y agoHaha great. We spent some good minutes on it here @ the office.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- cheshire137 13y agoThe UI on this is terrible.
- darth_aardvark 13y agoSeriously, this almost seems like they went out of their way to make an unintuitive page. Who makes a form field without an enter button? And the forfeit box covers the input.
- babo 13y agoThis was fun, played by a lone guy but within minutes eight of us jumped in, scored 59%.
- lttlrck 13y agoReally frustrating. It less of a test of language knowledge than my monitors ability to survive being knocked off it's perch.
- valtron 13y agoI thought this would be easier than the Great Language Game...I was wrong.
- electic 13y agoThis page is very buggy and very hard to use.
- jetti 13y agoThis is neat but I wish the score was accurate. Currently if I click forfeit it will show me the correct answer but not do anything. I can then write in the answer and then it will increment the x/y score. However, it doesn't take into account forfeits so I always get a perfect score.
- foobar__ 13y agoThe site offers https but is broken when using it. It shows no questions.
- anaphor 13y agoYes, httpseverywhere breaks it here...
- groovy2shoes 13y agoAbout 90%. Yeah, I'm one of those programming language nerds (to the point that I'm irritated I only got ~90%!).
- wil421 13y agoHorrible UI and most of the examples were from obscure languages. The only one I got right was assembly and that is scary...
- gpvos 13y agoI need to press Escape to get to the next question? Worst UI ever.
- blindhippo 13y agoAll that whitespace and they can't be bothered to put a couple lines of instructions up. Failtastic. And yet, I'm hooked...
- peapicker 13y agoNermerle language, huh? no wonder I didn't get it.
- skrebbel 13y agoI love this. My theory is that the horrible UI is intentional(ly not spent more effort on), to separate the true language geeks from the giver-uppers. ps. I found a bug: Delphi is not a programming language, but Object Pascal is.
- talos 13y agohttps everywhere breaks this, because the 3rd party JS is loaded insecurely, and http://(xxx).heroku.com http://(xxx).heroku.com has a redirect rule to https://(xxx).heroku.com https://(xxx).heroku.com. The external scripts should instead be loaded securely, or using the same protocol as the main page.
- tobyjsullivan 13y ago10/10 on awesome! 1/10 on usability (the one point is for auto-complete).
- dubcanada 13y agowow... this was actually harder then the language game I saw earlier. I don't think I've even seen 90% of these. And most of them look so similar it's hard to pick them apart with such a small snippet. D for example... how are you suppose to get that one right?
- mostly_harmless 13y agowell, at least for D: at the top there is 'import std.stdio;', which signifies importing one of the main modules in the language. Along with the C like syntax and writeln function, I was able to get it pretty quick. But, I've been doing all my personal projects in D for the past few weeks, so there's no surprise I got it.
- dubcanada 13y agoI guess I don't do enough stuff in D. But really shouldn't the snippets have more variation then 'import std.stdio;'?
- javajosh 13y agoGood concept, poor execution. The UI is terrible, but what's worse is that the code sample is not sufficient to differentiate the huge swath of Algol-derived languages. This is much like the impossibility of distinguishing all of the vaguely cyrillic baltic languages in the human language game posted earlier. In the "Identify a Language Game" Game, this one loses. Sorry!
- chamakits 13y agoThis is quite fun. Although after failing to get more than 1 at a time, I had to resort to cheating and taking a bit of a peak at code.js :P
- WayneDB 13y agoI came here to chew bubble-gum and complain about the UI...and I'm all out of bubble-gum.
- frozenport 13y agoWebsite is dysfunctional. No clear way to restart (reloading doesn't reset game) also no clear way to enter choice. Using Firefox 23.
- axman6 13y agoDidn't mind the UI once I read the help, not disappointed with 26/75 (34.67%). That was fun!