What's That Programming Language?

http://wtpl.heroku.com/

by Garbage • 14 years ago

177 104 14 years ago

wtpl.heroku.com

angerman• 14 years ago

somewhere in the upper 70s it starts being undefined... Confused Delphi with Pascal, and then missed Pascal m(

Interesting though :D

jcfrei2• 14 years ago

cool idea. but add a submit button, or listen for enter key. right now clicking on the language of choice doesnt always work.

chimeracoder• 14 years ago

I thought that too, but it turns out I was confusing two Lisp dialects. At least on Chrome, as soon as you type the correct name, it continues to the next language.

Figs• 14 years ago

It automatically advances when you get the answer right. If it's not advancing, you're probably entering the wrong language (even if you think you're right; there are a lot of similar looking, but obscure languages in there). I agree that it would be nicer if the author made it more obvious as to how it worked though.

jcfrei2• 14 years ago

ah, I see. that's why it never worked, apparently I guessed most of them wrong ;)

mehulkar• 14 years ago

Doesn't work for me on Linuxmint. Can't submit for some reason?

sebphfx• 14 years ago

I m on Mint and it works.LMDE though. Chrome.

_delirium• 14 years ago

Same here on Chrome on OSX. Can click "forfeit", but I don't see a "submit" button, and hitting enter doesn't do anything.

RBerenguel• 14 years ago

The app clears as soon as it's right. If you are not getting it... Well, there are things that look like Lisp, C or Forth and aren't :/

banter• 14 years ago

Running Chrome on OSX, too.

If the input text is correct, it is automatically submitted and you move on to the next language sample. If you haven't typed the correct answer, nothing happens and you can either keep guessing or forfeit.

Edit: Darn, was beat to it.

Edootjuh2• 14 years ago

It auto-submits when you type the right language.

prof_hobart• 14 years ago

I feel this could do with an Easy/Medium/Hard option. I've been programming for about 30 years and I can honestly say I've never heard of Falcon or Piet.

richbradshaw• 14 years ago

My guess for Falcon was Eagle, and my guess for Piet was Mondrian... I'm getting there! :)

dkersten2• 14 years ago

I used Falcon for a very short time about a year and a half ago yet I got it wrong...

OT: Falcon is actually a pretty interesting little language.

andrewflnr• 14 years ago

Great, what I need right now is not to get into another language... Seriously though, thanks for the tip, it does look pretty interesting.

fullmoon• 14 years ago

The Lisps sure aren't easy

zbowling3• 14 years ago

I wish I could just type "Lisp" and get half credit.

budu• 14 years ago

Depends where you are coming from, for me they were the easiest!

jarel• 14 years ago

Score: 30/52 (57.69%)

Damn, I thought I was good at this.

edit: 46/77 I guess, after 75 it's only undefined (so my score should probably be 46/75)

dewiz• 14 years ago

"That" is a form that doesnt work on ipad ;) please add a submit button, thanks

jontro• 14 years ago

Works for me on ipad

tomp• 14 years ago

Please accept the answer "SML" for "Standard ML" as well.

ajuc4• 14 years ago

Agreed.

jamesjyu• 14 years ago

Yes, this got me too :)

mahmud• 14 years ago

I guessed SML & Ocaml on an option. No dice. Had to forfeit a good score.. it was F#

;-)

chris_wot• 14 years ago

It's not called SML at Rosetta Code. See here: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/99_Bottles_of_Beer

Not sure how they would get around this one.

chc• 14 years ago

Create a map of synonyms and run the user's input through it before doing the match?

adrusi• 14 years ago

38/75 (50.67%)

ziedaniel1• 14 years ago

40/75 (53.33%)

Wow, there are so many languages I still need to try.... I'm proud I got ones like Piet, Io, and Racket, though.

pepijndevos• 14 years ago

It seems most people score around 50%, did anyone get a really high score?

I like it that you can clearly see several "streams" of syntax. That does make it hard to find the correct C family.

bitops3• 14 years ago

I worked with one person who I think could probably get a pretty high score. He was always talking about crazy esoteric languages that I'd never heard of - but then again, he was working on his own programming language in his spare time. So language enthusiasts or compiler writers would probably score better.

bruceboughton• 14 years ago

I thought this was going to be a tool where you paste in some code and it tells you which programming languages it could be written in.

It would be interesting to see how much code you need to be able to accurately identify the language.

maybird• 14 years ago

I second that. I'd also love to see a tool which would allow you to provide a binary and tell you what built it.

Dinoguy1000• 14 years ago

TrID[1] has a number of definitions for various executable files, but it's designed for general-purpose file format identification. PEiD[2] is built specifically for identifying packers, compilers, etc. for PE files, and should therefore be able to identify a far wider array of them (the site claims it detects over 600 PE signatures), but I've never done any checking myself, and the project unfortunately seems to be discontinued.

[1] http://mark0.net/soft-trid-e.html [2] http://www.peid.info/

keeperofdakeys• 14 years ago

Besides certain languages with special keywords, the easiest way would be to send it through syntax checkers iteratively. You could probably have generic "C-style" and "common lisp style" types of checks, then you would have to actually look at api commands. The latter method would be rather problematic.

isagalaev• 14 years ago

This is basically what highlight.js does indeed :-)

jakubw• 14 years ago

Some syntax highlighters, such as highlight.js [0], can do language detection and it works reasonably well with short snippets too.

[0] http://softwaremaniacs.org/soft/highlight/en/

markelliot• 14 years ago

Maybe there's another page where you can submit the samples and this is the presentation/identification ;-)

TazeTSchnitzel2• 14 years ago

I felt terrible each time I didn't recognise a language I'd used. Makefiles, Delphi and Batch files, to name three.

Agathos• 14 years ago

Heh. I've never used Delphi and I got that one. Thank goodness for learning Pascal in high school, I guess. (And reading somewhere that Delphi is related.)

I missed Erlang, even though I have a copy of Programming Erlang somewhere. Guess it didn't take.

dkersten2• 14 years ago

I tried guessing Pascal and Modula and a few more for Delphi. I was thinking to myself "what other languages look like Pascal" and in the end gave up. Felt really dumb then when it turned out to be Delphi.

The other one where this happened was F#. I tried OCaml and Snandard ML and was thinking "this HAS to be OCaml..." and again, felt silly for not thinking of F#.

mihaifm• 14 years ago

I missed a lot of easy ones too. At some point you get bored and just click Forfeit without paying too much attention.

writetoalok• 14 years ago

And I felt sick that I got as high as 25% of them. I think it is better to know just a few of them very well. However the ones I use everyday I got immediately ...

What is interesting is so many languages look like C or Lisp or ML or its variants.

freeazy• 14 years ago

Brainfuck http://i.imgur.com/9DiTe.png

Edootjuh2• 14 years ago

21/75. It returns undefined after 75.

2ck• 14 years ago

"Oh, you can identify 33 programming languages at a glance? Aren't you clever."

agumonkey2• 14 years ago

Ah I hit a bug where the page didnt redraw, I thought they were making a joke saying all languages are the same u__u;

Languages never saw before :

seed7, whenever.

Happy to see my friend COBOL too.

ajuc4• 14 years ago

I got it too, the same code for 5 languages I've never heard about, one after another. I felt ignorant, until it told me it's also valid racket :).

    int main(){
       for(int i = 99; i > 0; i--){
          write(i + " bottles of beer on the wall, " + i + " bottles of beer.\n");
          write("Take one down and pass it around, " + (i-1) + " bottles of beer on the wall.\n\n");
        }
        write("No more bottles of beer on the wall, no more bottles of beer.\n");
        write("Go to the store and buy some more, 99 bottles of beer on the wall.\n");
    }

agumonkey2• 14 years ago

lol, but Racket being so DSL friendly I would have doubted myself.

My 5 bugged languages were : scala, groovy, Dart, they're all not too unrelated.

adir12• 14 years ago

So I've been doing relatively well, up to 12 and score of 75% - but then I hit TI-BASIC. After I chose it right, the number on the left progressed, but nothing changed in the language itself. After that, kept clicking Forfeit and counter on the left increases (as score naturally goes down), but nothing was displayed where language sample should be. I am on latest Safari on Mac. I CAN HAZ BUG FIXZ, PLZ? But seriously, tons of crazy languages out there - I wonder if it is because we each want to have our own? I know I put together one or two myself, over the years :)

strager• 14 years ago

Same happened to me at "Bash". Chrome 18 stable, OS X.

andkerosine14• 14 years ago

Author here. Sorry for nipping your adventure short, but I caught sight of how fast the logs were scrolling, noted the HN referrer, and decided it'd probably be best to stop requesting the next code block from the server and just store everything client-side. With almost 10k uniques in ~16 hours, I imagine I've gone well over the 750 free dyno hours with this one. Oops...

adir12• 14 years ago

Awesome work, either way! Very impressive collection of language samples. It would make great post to tell us how you put this together, especially where these code samples were from and anything else of interest. Kudos!

bitops3• 14 years ago

Should be case-insensitive. I put 'awk'.

vitno• 14 years ago

20%... ouch

nilium• 14 years ago

I sure missed a lot of those, but at least I got Intercal right. That's probably a bad thing, now that I think about it.

bitops3• 14 years ago

It'd be fun to see the complete list of languages. I was clicking 'Forfeit' to see if Mercury was included.

turshija• 14 years ago

You can see the list of languages in .js file stored in `langs` variable: http://wtpl.heroku.com/js/engine.js

andkerosine14• 14 years ago

What with that link just sitting there out in the open, I want to clarify that it's transpiled CoffeeScript and that the original[1] is far more sane.

[1] http://wtpl.heroku.com/js/engine.coffee

igorgue• 14 years ago

Lisp, Clojure, Racket, Scheme! Every time I saw a Lisp dialect...

Tyr42• 14 years ago

Please, if you show me a list of things, let me use my arrowkeys. Also, can you finish more gracefully than giving my undefined?

zootm2• 14 years ago

That is annoying. Also irritating is the fact that the quiz seems to stop accepting answers after a couple of questions for me; in both Chrome and Firefox so far. I want so desperately to get a score!

Edit: Actually, it just turns out (after reading the source) that in some cases it just won't accept the answer if it's wrong. I did the honourable thing and selected "Forfeit", allowing me to continue :)

andkerosine14• 14 years ago

I know auto-accepting only the correct answer is a pretty unorthodox way to do it, but I initially took to making this to familiarize myself with the various syntaxes, and it's the approach I tend to opt for when teaching myself things by rote (notably the Japanese kana and one to ten in all sorts of spoken languages) and it seems to work pretty well. Something about pressing Enter or a "submit" button breaks the neural flow for me; I tend to recall things much more effectively when I become a "constant input stream", for lack of a better phrase. Apologies if it doesn't quite suit you.

andkerosine14• 14 years ago

But "undefined" is such a beautiful terminus; what lies beyond the horizon is entirely up to your imagination. : )

Also, I opted for Tab completion instead of arrow keys; it's much faster and far less finicky to implement robustly.

luv2code• 14 years ago

Score: 75/75 (100.00%)

Looking at the source in a programming challenge is still winning, right?

eddie_the_head• 14 years ago

The APL font there is rendering strangely for me, it was the first one posed to me and I recognized it, but a lot of the symbols were rendering as unicode letters with umlauts and other errors.

edit: I just finished, 63/75

colinmarc2• 14 years ago

That last language is REALLY concise.

andkerosine14• 14 years ago

Which do you mean? They're scrambled randomly at the start.

zbowling3• 14 years ago

the really undefined language.

FreeFull• 14 years ago

I got 20/76 (26.32%) and now all it's displaying is "undefined". I assume this is the end, it would be nice to have a dialog box or something similar say that though.

ajuc4• 14 years ago

That was surprising:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chef_(programming_language)

nmb• 14 years ago

I was totally surprised to see that on there too! I love the creator's webcomics too, in high school they were my first introduction to several science/math concepts (the square-cube law and cryptography to name a few).

http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/

b0rsuk• 14 years ago

I had no idea SNUSP is so whimsical. Brilliant !

andkerosine14• 14 years ago

To think that Brainfuck * Befunge could be anything but a disaster.

raverbashing• 14 years ago

There are real challenges there! Hence

21/76 (27.63%)

robert_nsu• 14 years ago

Apparently I suck pretty bad. I got ML, Ocaml, and F# confused.

wazoox• 14 years ago

28/75 but I managed to to fail at recognizing bash I use daily, shame on me :)

ptc• 14 years ago

Cheat Code, activated: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/99_Bottles_of_Beer

andkerosine14• 14 years ago

The person on a high score list of one is in both first and last place. Zen to remember.

olliesaunders• 14 years ago

36/75. I honestly had no idea I knew of so many languages.

GigabyteCoin• 14 years ago

Is this in almost-alphabetical order?

I have clicked "forfeit" approximately 10 times, and all returned languages were AAABABBBCBCCCCC-esque if you know what I mean?

andkerosine14• 14 years ago

The culprit:

    Array::shuffle = -> @sort -> 0.5 - Math.random()

was just too damned sexy to pass up, but it's apparently pretty bad at distribution. Running it ten times seems to have helped. : )

pubby• 14 years ago

I think I got every esoteric one correct but knew only a handful of actual languages. Guess I should change my priorities.

groovy2shoes• 14 years ago

60/75, awww right :)

Cool app, it's pretty fun despite a few (seeming) bugs here and there. Some languages in there I've never even heard of... guess I'll have to check them out. At the same time, there are a few I can think of that aren't included... room for expansion, I guess.

andkerosine14• 14 years ago

The intention, ideally, is to get a system in place that allows for seamlessly adding new languages and "tasks" and open it up.

el_presidente• 14 years ago

Thank you for making me hate lisp more than I did yesterday.

pardner• 14 years ago

Didn't see APL - did they include it? Maybe it was just so short I missed it.

andkerosine14• 14 years ago

It's definitely in there, nowhere near as short as the K and Golfscript solutions, though.

ScottBurson• 14 years ago

What? No SNOBOL?

aufreak3• 14 years ago

It's not funny that languages such as Joy, AppleScript and Hypercard don't even autocomplete but haXe and xpath do. I was going to suggest putting in all names from "http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/ - "An interactive roster of programming languages" which used to list over 5000 iirc, but that site is now down! :(

andkerosine14• 14 years ago

Populating the list with answers that are irrelevant almost 99% of the time would be downright cruel.

jblz• 14 years ago

Fun game :)

'Batch file' should accept 'batch,' imo

gavinpc2• 14 years ago

Requires cookies. If it doesn't work at all for you, it may be because you need to whitelist the site.

But I wouldn't bother.

andkerosine14• 14 years ago

Having written it, I can assure you that cookies are not required for it to work, and thus no whitelisting should be necessary. I think you may've had some other problem.

gavinpc2• 14 years ago

My mistake. It just seems broken because when you press "Enter" on an incorrect answer, nothing happens. I guess I had better luck after enabling cookies.

nathell• 14 years ago

45/75 (60.00%)

What's That Programming Language?

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