Wow 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.
It 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.)
Not 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?)
It 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.
You 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
I 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).
clicking 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...
Those 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.
I 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.
It 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).
Some 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.
I 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.
That 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.
Yeah, 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.
It'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
Goes 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.
Thanks - 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.
Seriously, 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.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadA 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
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).
[EDIT] My mistake, all you have to do is turn off https everywhere, or reload using http. Frustrating, but not 100% broken...
pretty cool quiz, i definitely don't know hardly any of these...
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.
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.
edit: Oh never mind, this is just a shitty user experience. Sorry for the misunderstanding, folks.
It would have been more intuitive and less work on their part to have "guess" and "forfeit" buttons.
The emperor is naked, man!
Some language syntax are too similar (eg scheme and racket) so you need to know the libraries as well.
Around 70% of the ones I got were languages I have never used, which seems kind of odd.
I will definitely consult this next time I find myself asking which language I should dabble with next.