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Got 14/15 but I have a feeling it was only because I made the assumption I would not see the same language twice. Without that assumption a few were toss ups for me.

Of all the languages on there the only one in that set I had never used / seen at all is Kotin and that's the one I got wrong.

Several of them were mandatory for me to learn in college but I haven't seen since. (looking at you, Prolog and Verilog... Verilog is useful but I don't do hardware dev)



Got 14/15 because I couldn't tell Emacs Lisp from Clojure. Argh ...


The [ ] around the args are the giveaway.


defn vs defun :)

I remembered it somehow as "clojure doesn't allow you to define fun"


Lol, I should print this out on a poster and give it to That One Clojure Guy(tm) at work.


Missed this as well. I should have guessed Clojure because it's a language people actually might use. All I could tell is it's some kind of Lisp.


Yep, I also missed Kotlin. I technically missed Clojure too, because I rushed and hit Emacs Lisp before actually fully reading the example and all the answers.


I also scored 14/15 - got PHP wrong I thought it was Perl which is slightly embarrassing as I've never used PHP but I have used Perl.


PHP and Perl are basically like Spanish and Italian when it comes to syntax. Both can more or less interoperate with the assistance of lots of hand gestures and facial expressions.


Ditto. I'm positive that code would be valid Perl with the right libraries.

Which isn't saying much.


Same here, because I knew they intersected and presumed it was a trick question. Technically, I believe it is neither valid perl nor PHP because it's missing an opening brace on one of the if statements.


PHP lets you skip using curly braces for conditionals. I've seen real-world code which used this style only once, and it was about as bad as you'd expect.


Yeah, I suspected that, but it looked like there was a close brace and no open brace. (I only noticed because I was specifically looking at the braces to try to determine if it was PHP.)


The lovely globals (e.g. `$_GET`) are what give PHP away.


Can concur. I managed to get all correct, but that one question that almost tripped me was the PHP question.

As an ex-perl dev, (looks at self) shrugs in disbelief!


I did that too, and in the same situation (although I got more wrong).


I also missed Kotlin.

A lot of them could be inferred from what the code is doing. For example, PHP and Perl are sometimes really hard to distinguish, but I was able to get PHP right by deciding that "this ain't what a Perl hacker would write". Same with Ada v. VHDL.


Missed Kotlin here too. I also missed one where I guessed Haskell when it was actually Prolog.

I feel like this quiz was much more about how much you've dabbled at surface level in various languages, enough or not enough to remember specific details to aid in process of elimination. For example, I knew what GLSL stood for, so the picture was most definitely not GLSL. And I had at one point written Scheme and looked into Lisp enough to guess that it was Clojure and not Lisp. And I remembered vaguely enough that Objective-C still uses C-like pointer notation, for example. And I remembered enough of computer engineering class to immediately identify that the VHDL question's code fit the use case despite not having written a line of VHDL (or Verilog) ever.


For the last question, a smattering of art history will guide your guessing much better than a smattering of computer science!


I got Kotlin right, but only because I happened to see some Kotlin code (due to the somewhat recent HN thread about it, based on a post by Steve Yegge), else might have got it wrong, due to maybe thinking Kotlin syntax would likely be similar to Java.

On second thoughts, though, I guess there is no need for a JVM language's syntax to resemble Java's (much, anyway). E.g. Jython, JRuby, Groovy, etc.




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