What's That Programming Language? | Hacker News Reader

What's That Programming Language?

wtpl.heroku.com

87 pointslambda_cube68 comments

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

Looks like a lot of people are complaining about the bad user interface which seems too clever for its own good. But what do they know?

The emperor is naked, man!

At the moment, no.

It is also broken on TLS. But to be fair, the ? text says " If it seems borked, your guess is wrong. "

Won't let me answer questions (on Chrome 29.0.1547.62 for Mac OS X 10.8.4)...

edit: Oh never mind, this is just a shitty user experience. Sorry for the misunderstanding, folks.

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.

Good concept, poor execution. The UI is terrible, but what's worse is that the code sample is not sufficient to differentiate the huge swath of Algol-derived languages. This is much like the impossibility of distinguishing all of the vaguely cyrillic baltic languages in the human language game posted earlier.

In the "Identify a Language Game" Game, this one loses. Sorry!

This is quite neat. Btw, this breaks with the Https everywhere extension.

Good catch. I was about to just give up after feeling kind of stupid.

Half of them look like C with one additional keyword!

And the other half looks like Lisp :-)

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.

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?)

I think it's great: you get to see all these obscure languages and how similar they are to languages you do know.

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.

10/10 on awesome! 1/10 on usability (the one point is for auto-complete).

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.

https everywhere breaks this, because the 3rd party JS is loaded insecurely, and http://(xxx).heroku.com has a redirect rule to https://(xxx).heroku.com.

The external scripts should instead be loaded securely, or using the same protocol as the main page.

Really frustrating. It less of a test of language knowledge than my monitors ability to survive being knocked off it's perch.

This is neat but I wish the score was accurate. Currently if I click forfeit it will show me the correct answer but not do anything. I can then write in the answer and then it will increment the x/y score. However, it doesn't take into account forfeits so I always get a perfect score.

Hit escape to advance. It's a weird UI.

Ya, I figured it out after I posted that. However, I shouldn't be able to "game the system" the way that I did.

Only 50%...

Some language syntax are too similar (eg scheme and racket) so you need to know the libraries as well.

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.

I love this. My theory is that the horrible UI is intentional(ly not spent more effort on), to separate the true language geeks from the giver-uppers.

ps. I found a bug: Delphi is not a programming language, but Object Pascal is.

The site offers https but is broken when using it. It shows no questions.

Yes, httpseverywhere breaks it here...

Nermerle language, huh? no wonder I didn't get it.

About 90%. Yeah, I'm one of those programming language nerds (to the point that I'm irritated I only got ~90%!).

I can only recognize a couple of popular languages. I doubt my result will get any better in the future and i think that is a good thing.

The UI on this is terrible.

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.

Horrible UI and most of the examples were from obscure languages. The only one I got right was assembly and that is scary...

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.

After some recent hours spent banging my head against a wall, the Chef language example amuses me greatly :)

The score thing seems to be broken though. Clicking on forfeit doesn't seem to affect it

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...

Ah, thanks! The help says to click again to go to the next one, but that doesn't seem to actually work.

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.

15/44.

Around 70% of the ones I got were languages I have never used, which seems kind of odd.

I need to press Escape to get to the next question? Worst UI ever.

Unfortunately this doesn't work in mobile Safari...

Nor in Firefox here, FWIW. Pity, it might have been fun.

Click on the question mark. I'm running firefox and it works...just know what you have to do

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.

turn off https everywhere

I'm not running HTTPS Everywhere.

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).

This is quite fun. Although after failing to get more than 1 at a time, I had to resort to cheating and taking a bit of a peak at code.js :P

Website is dysfunctional. No clear way to restart (reloading doesn't reset game) also no clear way to enter choice. Using Firefox 23.

This page is very buggy and very hard to use.

Didn't mind the UI once I read the help, not disappointed with 26/75 (34.67%). That was fun!

wow... this was actually harder then the language game I saw earlier. I don't think I've even seen 90% of these. And most of them look so similar it's hard to pick them apart with such a small snippet.

D for example... how are you suppose to get that one right?

well, at least for D: at the top there is 'import std.stdio;', which signifies importing one of the main modules in the language. Along with the C like syntax and writeln function, I was able to get it pretty quick. But, I've been doing all my personal projects in D for the past few weeks, so there's no surprise I got it.

I guess I don't do enough stuff in D. But really shouldn't the snippets have more variation then 'import std.stdio;'?

This was fun, played by a lone guy but within minutes eight of us jumped in, scored 59%.

Addicted to nigh-on instant gratification, I gave up waiting. Too slow, sorry!

I thought this would be easier than the Great Language Game...I was wrong.

Haha great. We spent some good minutes on it here @ the office.

wow, that's quite hard :)

I came here to chew bubble-gum and complain about the UI...and I'm all out of bubble-gum.

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