Rosetta Code

February 16, 2012 12:09 PM

"Rosetta Code is a programming chrestomathy site." Each page describes a programming concept or task, then lists how it's implemented in dozens of programming languages. Useful for learning a new programming language, especially if you're already familiar with how to do it in another language.
posted by Deathalicious (13 comments total)

Too bad there aren't examples in Chef
posted by xorry at 12:41 PM on February 16, 2012

See also the Programming Language Examples Alike Cookbook, the Algorithm Implementation Wikbook, Hyperpolyglot, and the rather more limited 99 bottles of beer.
posted by James Scott-Brown at 12:44 PM on February 16, 2012 [4 favorites]

http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Hello_world/Text#Chef
posted by monospace at 12:44 PM on February 16, 2012 [5 favorites]

And for just 5 easy payments of $19.99 you can learn how to speak French, Spanish, German, and more.
posted by Fizz at 2:01 PM on February 16, 2012

Sad that it has so little LISP, but the one nontrivial entry is a "Quine." I had never heard of that, but now I know the full etymology of the "porpuquine," 10+ years after my AI professor introduced us to the beast. That's the sign of a good prof, when they manage to keep teaching you more than a decade later.
posted by TreeRooster at 2:21 PM on February 16, 2012 [3 favorites]

"Rosetta Code is a programming chrestomathy site."

Chrestomanci?

Oh! So sorry to bother you, sir! That is a *fabulous* dressing gown, though.
posted by maryr at 3:48 PM on February 16, 2012 [4 favorites]

Very cool. I'm a programming n00b and can barely write "hello, world", so seeing these different examples, even just in Python, which I'm trying to learn, is really helpful. Tutorials get boring quick without some practical application of the skills.
posted by zardoz at 3:51 PM on February 16, 2012

Last time I looked some examples in some languages were far from idiomatic. But as a rough check it's pretty cool.

You'd think the lispers would go to town on this kind of site, perhaps though it would show that for something like a file read it would require a different entry for every version (and sometimes dot rev)... ;-) But look at Clojure, it's and up and coming lisp and seems to be well represented.
posted by sammyo at 4:01 PM on February 16, 2012

You know what language I always want to see on this kind of thing? Metafont. Well, how about that?
posted by eruonna at 4:04 PM on February 16, 2012

I like the concept, but execution is maybe not ideal. The examples for looping over arrays in Python and Javascript here and here are not great descriptions. Also the code is confusing because there's no standard; they keep looping over different examples in different languages, etc. No big surprise, looping over arrays is surprisingly tricky in many programming languages (particularly Javascript), but I worry that people learning languages from this site may learn them the wrong way.
posted by Nelson at 4:04 PM on February 16, 2012

So, I made a shirt a few years ago "Your Favorite Programming Language Sucks". The front of the shirt just says the aforementioned, and on the back is a bunch of output statements from various program languages outputting that phrase.
posted by symbioid at 4:57 PM on February 16, 2012

That site has just introduced me to WPS: PostScript for the Web (a PS interpreter in JavaScript for HTML5 Canvas), which will now be my favourite thing ever for the next half hour.
posted by scruss at 5:26 PM on February 16, 2012

Too bad there aren't examples in Chef.

Ahem..
posted by wanderingstan at 7:51 PM on February 16, 2012