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Guess the Programming Language

22 points| martinaglv | 11 years ago |tutorialzine.com | reply

18 comments

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[+] nate_martin|11 years ago|reply
I was expecting this to be a lot less straightforward. It would be interesting to see if you could trick people by writing code in such a way that it looks like it is a different language.
[+] bradbeattie|11 years ago|reply
"In computing, a polyglot is a computer program or script written in a valid form of multiple programming languages, which performs the same operations or output independent of the programming language used to compile or interpret it." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyglot_(computing)

That might make it even trickier if the answer isn't a set of radio buttons, but checkboxes instead.

[+] wingerlang|11 years ago|reply
I think this was too easy. Maybe it should group more similar languages together or something.
[+] mutagen|11 years ago|reply
The choices offered gave away too much, I was able to pick out languages I've never spent any time looking at, much less coding, from the choices offered. Make me choose from the whole list of 20 or more instead of 3 or 4 each time and I'd get less than half instead of 20/20.

Maybe I'm more aware than I give myself credit for, though.

[+] izzydata|11 years ago|reply
The php one had a <?php tag at the top of it. Just saying.
[+] LyndsySimon|11 years ago|reply
That's almost a language requirement. You could use short tags, and begin the file with "<?" :)
[+] infogulch|11 years ago|reply
If you've done (heck, even seen) a hello world in half of these languages, you can get the rest via elimination.
[+] cessor|11 years ago|reply
I loved the one that somehow looked like BF* but was actually JS ;)

Confusion could arise when doing python in ruby or having some subtle distinction between c and c++, but I guess the test is not made to trick people or diagnose actual language knowledge. Still, lots of fun!

[+] eldelshell|11 years ago|reply
The alert call is what makes that one easy.
[+] diasporick|11 years ago|reply
I haven't written a line in half of these languages, and I got a perfect score.

I still don't know what this says about the uniqueness of programming languages or the ratio of code reading to code writing in the industry.

[+] maninalift|11 years ago|reply
Am I shallow that it made me feel good getting all the answers right even though I knew most of the people who tried it would?
[+] blt|11 years ago|reply
somewhere there's a much harder version, it has code that could be c/c++, c#/java, scheme/CL, except for one little distinguishing feature.