Nerd quiz - Can you name a programming language for every letter of the alphabet?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31701

by kvogt • 19 years ago

9 23 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

kvogt• 19 years ago

Justin.tv crew came up with 20.

cperciva• 19 years ago

Off the top of my head: Ada, BCPL, C, Delphi, Erlang, Fortran, Godel, Haskell, Intercal, Java, K (if hypothetical languages count? This is a project by some FreeBSD developers to produce a more powerful version of C designed for kernel programming), Logo, Maple, N??, Occam, Pascal, Q??, Ratfor, Sed, TeX, U??, Visual Basic (if this counts as a language in itself rather than as a version of BASIC), Whitespace, X??, Yorick, Z??

I guess that's 19-21 out of 26, depending on the exact rules.

emmett• 19 years ago

We couldn't figure out N, U, or Z either.

Q is easy - QuickBasic, under the same theory as V.

Whitespace - good call! We couldn't think of a W.

davidw2• 19 years ago

UML

mynameishere• 19 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicon_programming_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubercode http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniface_%28programming_language%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnrealScript_programming_language

(Don't ask me where I got my info)

ashu• 19 years ago

http://www.nickle.org/

Keith Packard has been working on it for a while...

philh• 19 years ago

Newlisp, if we're allowed different lisp dialects.

(If not, new challenge: lisp dialect for every letter of the alphabet.)

fallintothis• 19 years ago

Paul Graham has most of the work done for me: http://paulgraham.com/lisps.html He has A, B, C, D, E, F, G, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, S, V, and X - though I certainly can name some dialects of the same letters which are not listed. Not going to really bother on that one, though.

This leaves H, Q, R, T, U, W, Y, and Z, of which I can supply Qi ( http://www.lambdassociates.org/ ) and T ( http://mumble.net/~jar/tproject/ ). Bringing the list of unnamed (for me) to:

H, R, U, W, Y, Z.

That's the best I can do. Anyone else?

SwellJoe4• 19 years ago

Where's the challenge in that? I wanna see a factorial function, iterative and recursive (where applicable), in each. Now that's a nerd.

I'm guessing Trevor and rtm could manage about half the alphabet. pg, not a chance, he's too much of a language bigot.

I'd be lucky to get through maybe five without consulting a reference of some sort.

pg• 19 years ago

arc, b, c, dylan, erlang, franz lisp, goo, haskell, interlisp, jscheme, kawa, lisp 1.5, maclisp, newlisp, ocaml, perl, qi, ratfor, scheme, t, uci lisp, verilog, waterloo basic, xlisp, yacc, zetalisp

(Being a language bigot doesn't constrain you too much if your favorite language is a language-family.)

SwellJoe4• 19 years ago

Touché.

Once again, age and guile beats (relative) youth, innocence, and a bad haircut.

russ• 19 years ago

APL, Brainfuck, Cobol, D, Erlang, Fortran, Goedel, Haskell, INTERCAL, Javascript, K, Lisp, Matlab, NewtonScript, OCaml, Python, QBasic, Ruby, Smalltalk, TeX, UnrealScript, Verilog, Wierd, XSLT, Yorick, Z++

shankys• 19 years ago

Assembly, Bash, C, Dylan, Emacs Lisp, F#, Groovy, Haskell, Icon, Java, K, Lua, Mathematica, Nemerle, Oz, Perl, Qi, R, Scheme, Tcl, UnrealScript, VRML, Whitespace, XQuery, Yorick, Z++

(I tried to pick different PLs than russ if I could think of one, though I admit I didn't know of Yorick or Z++)

dfranke• 19 years ago

Arc, Befunge, C++, Delphi, ECMAScript, FORTH, Guile, Hugo, IDL, J#, Ksh, Lex, Maple, nroff, Octave, PHP, QLISP, RPAL, SQL, TrueBasic, Unlambda, VHDL, WEB, XUL, yacc, ZZT-OOP.

gyro_robo• 19 years ago

No, but I can P a lot.

Python, PHP, Perl, PostScript, PDF, Pascal, Pict, Pike, PL/1, Prolog.

Don't you love IBM... Programming Language 1... Operating System 2...

benhoyt2• 19 years ago

What about A, B, C, D, E, F, G, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, Y and Z?

Seriously, they're all real single-letter languages (Google for "[letter] programming language" and wade through the results).

I knew of only about 5 of them already (B, C, D, E, K). I couldn't find real languages for H, I, O or X.

antirez• 19 years ago

I failed:

A: Ada, B: B, C: C, D: D, E: Erlang, F: Forth, G: Gwbasic, H: Haskell, I: Io, L: Lisp, M: Miranda, N: Newtop Script, O: OCaml, P: Perl, Q: Qbasic, R: Ruby, S: Scheme, T: Tcl, U: ?, V: Visualbasic, Z: ?, X: ?, Y: Yacc, W: ?, K: ?

Nerd quiz - Can you name a programming language for every letter of the alphabet?

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