
What's That Programming Language? - lambda_cube
http://wtpl.heroku.com
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jlarocco
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.

~~~
tieTYT
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.

~~~
adrusi
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

~~~
crististm
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!

~~~
TheEmperor
At the moment, no.

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tomphoolery
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.

~~~
canthonytucci
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.

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javajosh
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!

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

~~~
adamb0mb1
Good catch. I was about to just give up after feeling kind of stupid.

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quchen
Half of them look like C with one additional keyword!

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perlgeek
And the other half looks like Lisp :-)

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the_watcher
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.

~~~
cgtyoder
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.)

~~~
the_watcher
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?)

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

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

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stonemetal
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.

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

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

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

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jetti
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.

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

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

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draven
Only 50%...

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

~~~
VLM
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.

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skrebbel
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.

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

~~~
anaphor
Yes, httpseverywhere breaks it here...

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

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groovy2shoes
About 90%. Yeah, I'm one of _those_ programming language nerds (to the point
that I'm irritated I _only_ got ~90%!).

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deletes
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.

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cheshire137
The UI on this is terrible.

~~~
darth_aardvark
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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wil421
Horrible UI and most of the examples were from obscure languages. The only one
I got right was assembly and that is scary...

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dccoolgai
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.

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

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

~~~
dlhavema
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...

~~~
ccross59
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.

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tzs
15/44.

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

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

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

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

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

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Silhouette
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.

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chamakits
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

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

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electic
This page is very buggy and very hard to use.

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axman6
Didn't mind the UI once I read the help, not disappointed with 26/75 (34.67%).
That was fun!

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dubcanada
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?

~~~
mostly_harmless
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.

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

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

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vixen99
Addicted to nigh-on instant gratification, I gave up waiting. Too slow, sorry!

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

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

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etherealG
wow, that's quite hard :)

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

