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
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!
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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).
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.
It would have been more intuitive and less work on their part to have "guess" and "forfeit" buttons.