Hello World Quiz

September 11, 2013 5:04 PM

Guess the programming language by "Hello World" snippet.
posted by Artw (62 comments total)

Those are some obscure languages in there. (Your favorite programming language sucks.)
posted by spacewrench at 5:07 PM on September 11, 2013 [5 favorites]

I thought "Oh, it says java right in the code, how simple."

Nope, Xtend.
posted by ckape at 5:09 PM on September 11, 2013 [3 favorites]

I never got a Processing snippet SO I QUIT
posted by gorbichov at 5:09 PM on September 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

This is fun, thanks.

(There's also this one, which focusses more on ten green bottles.)
posted by motty at 5:10 PM on September 11, 2013

Ha! Processing is one of the easier ones to identify.

(The Java like ones are hell.)
posted by Artw at 5:10 PM on September 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

I was surprised at how well I did considering how few of these obscure languages I have ever actually used.
posted by localroger at 5:12 PM on September 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

900. I got C C++ and C# in one question.
posted by shothotbot at 5:12 PM on September 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

I'm a little proud to say I cashed out around LOLCODE vs OMGROFL.

Why?
posted by graphnerd at 5:13 PM on September 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

1200 and I know nothing about programming so there!
posted by dabug at 5:14 PM on September 11, 2013

Taking any specific test is pointless. A good test taker could learn how to take just about any test in 15 minutes.
posted by Ad hominem at 5:15 PM on September 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Heh, nice example for R...
posted by Jimbob at 5:24 PM on September 11, 2013

Rule of thumb: if it looks like Java, it isn't.
posted by treepour at 5:39 PM on September 11, 2013 [5 favorites]

Except the time that it is.
posted by wierdo at 5:41 PM on September 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

2100, with a lot of semi-informed guesses.
posted by aubilenon at 5:42 PM on September 11, 2013

I could do "guess the Zork based on 'hello, sailor'" but these have me stumped.
posted by Admiral Haddock at 5:43 PM on September 11, 2013

1400, like aubilenon, using a bit of knowing and a bit of eliminating.
posted by fatbird at 5:45 PM on September 11, 2013

I'd trouble whenever I'd both (a) never heard of the language and (b) almost never used the canonical parent language. So obscure List variants, Ruby variants, and RPN languages screwed me.
I found the variants on Java, C, functional languages, and notable scripting languages fairly easy. I've never used Java much, but Java is so common that its variants get discussed more. Also, I confidently pushed Shakespeare when confronted with an enormous mass of text, nope Chef.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:56 PM on September 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

I can't tell the difference between COBOL and ABAP. I'm happy with this.

2900. I finally bombed out when asked to pick between Elixr and Matlab. I've never heard of the former and never seen any code written in the latter, so I guess that's that.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 6:08 PM on September 11, 2013

Wow, I'm not as au courant as I used to be about programming languages. I can barely tell Go from Dart!
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 6:11 PM on September 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

Well excuse me for not knowing Fantom. Geez.
posted by feckless at 6:14 PM on September 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Yeah I totally agree that there's some bullshit languages that nobody ever uses.
posted by aubilenon at 6:16 PM on September 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

The Ada/Delphi/Pascal ones killed me, since I've never touched any of them...
posted by BungaDunga at 6:21 PM on September 11, 2013

1000! Yay! This is especially good because I sometimes forget which programming language I'm using mid-project.
posted by Cookiebastard at 6:21 PM on September 11, 2013 [8 favorites]

The first time I tried this, the sample was in Piet. I couldn't figure out what was going on, I just thought it was broken.

Oh, wait! It wasn't this, it was "What's that programming language?"
posted by heathkit at 6:24 PM on September 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

O bject
posted by infinitewindow at 6:36 PM on September 11, 2013

1,100. I got the C/C#/C++ one too. The LOLCODE and Chef ones were giveaways, free points.
posted by JHarris at 6:37 PM on September 11, 2013

3500. Something called "Rebol" did me in. Where did they dig these things up?

Although I knew it was getting desperate as soon as I was picking languages by thinking about the genealogy of the language and whether the syntax looked right for its family.
posted by sonic meat machine at 6:41 PM on September 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

I got C C++ and C# in one question.

That was just about the only one I was really confident on! Well, that and the one I got right because there were two choices and it was obviously not Perl.

What does it say about me that I got 4700? That seems not possible. Maybe I forgot my score while reading the comments.
posted by hoyland at 6:42 PM on September 11, 2013

This is the only test I've ever taken where randomly guessing actually improves my score.
posted by jabah at 6:54 PM on September 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

Is it just me, or are there a lot of languages that use either puts "hello, world!" or print "hello, world!"? I could swear there were some that were identical but were different languages.
posted by Ickster at 7:08 PM on September 11, 2013

2200! Died on Befunge.
posted by swift at 7:08 PM on September 11, 2013

800 :(

But my intro comp sci professor would probably be proud of me recognizing Scheme, since that's what I learned!

All my programming is in Matlab nowadays, though.
posted by dismas at 7:15 PM on September 11, 2013

The first time I got 500. The second time I got 5800. I'm not sure what that says.

It helped when I realized that each language only appears once.
posted by obvious at 7:16 PM on September 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

It helped when I realized that each language only appears once.

Yeah, that much was obvious.

Hello World Quiz

Stats

Games: 62457
Languages count: 63
Completion rate: 70.1%
Easiest language: Lua (93.7% of right guesses)
Hardest language: Nemerle (69.3% of wrong guesses)
Highest score: 6300

At least one person beat the game.
posted by 3FLryan at 7:17 PM on September 11, 2013

I think Nermele is the one I keep thinking is C#.
posted by Artw at 7:25 PM on September 11, 2013

1700 I don't know Brainfuck is seems
posted by mattoxic at 7:28 PM on September 11, 2013

It's Matlab example is

classdef hello
    methods
         function doit(this)
             disp('Hello, world!')
        end
    end
end

Another Matlab example would have been disp('Hello, world!'), because who the hell uses OO design principles in Matlab?
posted by Nomyte at 7:31 PM on September 11, 2013 [3 favorites]

Also the Perl example doesn't look like total garbage, no doubt rendering it unrecognizable to any true Perl developer.
posted by Artw at 7:34 PM on September 11, 2013 [6 favorites]

Not to be obnoxious but I'm both proud of the ones that I know and proud that I don't know those that I didn't.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 7:37 PM on September 11, 2013

Hey! I got the Perl one! And I got COBOL & ADA. That was it.

But i could have gotten SNOBOL, Algol 68, and even sed. Someone wrote a chess playing program in sed so it must be a language.
posted by Obscure Reference at 7:44 PM on September 11, 2013

But... It doesn't have a RegEx! Is it even still Perl? :-)
posted by Artw at 7:45 PM on September 11, 2013

Argh, this is just like that language quiz from a few days ago.

What language is this? (♬)
🌕 German
🌕 Upper Sorbian
🌕 Lower Sorbian
posted by Nomyte at 8:11 PM on September 11, 2013

I actually have dabbled in a lot of the more obscure languages on here and used to waste an inordinate amount of time on comp.lang.misc looking for new ones when that was a thing, but I did pretty poorly on this. It's largely because you can't really tell all that much from "hello world" programs.

I was able to distinguish all of the Lisp variants, though, which I'm pretty pleased about. You can tell it's befunge because it's two-dimensional and you can tell it's Xtend because it lacks semicolons.

It seems a bit cruel to show a short program and ask whether it's Pascal, Delphi, or Ada, though. At least they didn't add like Modula-2 in there or something. But that awk program, predictably, works perfectly fine as a Perl program as well.
posted by whir at 8:16 PM on September 11, 2013

Also the Perl example doesn't look like total garbage, no doubt rendering it unrecognizable to any true Perl developer.

I have now been sick of this kind of cheap, pointless, lazy calumniation for considerably more years than I was an active Perl hacker.
posted by brennen at 8:30 PM on September 11, 2013 [7 favorites]

Rule of thumb: if it looks like Java, it isn't.

That is pretty much my experience of programming in Java.
posted by srboisvert at 8:52 PM on September 11, 2013 [4 favorites]

It's Matlab example is...

Seriously? I use matlab literally 30% of every weekday (including time relaxing, eating and sleeping) and I don't know if I would have gotten that.

I know CS-types hate matlab, but I hope all the examples aren't that out-of-character.
posted by supercres at 9:26 PM on September 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

I have personally determined that if you don't know anything about programming languages, this quiz may be difficult.
posted by Uppity Pigeon #2 at 9:43 PM on September 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

2700. Includes at least one "too fast click".
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:54 PM on September 11, 2013

I also noticed that the awk hello world it gives is also parseable Perl. How nice of it.
posted by wierdo at 10:02 PM on September 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

I am certainly not playing this repeatedly until I get them all right. Oh no. That would be ridiculous behaviour.
posted by motty at 10:04 PM on September 11, 2013

Pfft. Alla that modern crap. Where's APL, Forth, 6502, Comal, BASEX?
posted by Twang at 10:06 PM on September 11, 2013

BungaDunga: "The Ada/Delphi/Pascal ones killed me, since I've never touched any of them..."

And you say never having touched Pascal is a bad thing.
posted by Samizdata at 10:06 PM on September 11, 2013

I know CS-types hate matlab, but I hope all the examples aren't that out-of-character.

Well that's why I laughed at the R example, which was basically:

cat("Hello World!")

Which is fair enough. That's how you print Hello World in R. It's also probably how you do it in about 50 other interpreted languages, so it would have been sensible to wrap it up in a function or something to make it unique. But it was multiple choice, so I guess you couldn't really go wrong.
posted by Jimbob at 10:09 PM on September 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Well, except you can go wrong.

For example, when it gives you the Awk example, which is also valid Perl, and provides 'Awk' and 'Perl' as alternatives.

Suspect there may be other instances of things like this going on.
posted by motty at 10:17 PM on September 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

From that Piet wikipedia page:

"Black cannot be entered; when the pointer tries to enter a black region, the rules of choosing the next block are changed instead."

At least that means you'll never get zwarte piet...
posted by MartinWisse at 10:35 PM on September 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

1300. Also, most of the ones I missed were subsets or supersets of the correct language, so claim the quiz was cheating.
posted by suetanvil at 12:01 AM on September 12, 2013

Does it ask about whitespace? Or Edwin Brady's other language Idris?
posted by jeffburdges at 12:31 AM on September 12, 2013

I tend to forget, being an actual software developer who uses a couple of real programming languages and not bullshit made-up academic or joke ones, how many bullshit made-up academic or joke languages there really are.

In other words, I did really poorly.
posted by Foosnark at 5:11 AM on September 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

Party pooper!
posted by jeffburdges at 5:55 AM on September 12, 2013

They should do one showing the factorial function, that's the standard "hello world" equivalent for functional languages. It also helps show off various features of the language that make identification more possible.
posted by destrius at 9:40 AM on September 12, 2013

motty: "For example, when it gives you the Awk example, which is also valid Perl, and provides 'Awk' and 'Perl' as alternatives."

To be fair, the lack of a semicolon after the print statement and the fact that it is all on one line is a clue. However, it being all on one line is what makes it valid Perl even without the semicolon, at least if I'm remembering the far too many years I spent with it correctly.

The one that has Perl as the correct answer is more idiomatic Perl.
posted by wierdo at 9:46 AM on September 12, 2013

It's valid perl because "Every simple statement must be terminated with a semicolon, unless it is the final statement in a block, in which case the semicolon is optional." I thought omitting the semicolon was mandatory to express the return value for some blocks like comparison operations passed to sort, but maybe that's wrong. I answered Awk here only because I noticed Awk before pressing Perl, and figured only Awk actually required a BEGIN for Hello World.
posted by jeffburdges at 10:13 AM on September 12, 2013