Nerd quiz - Can you name a programming language for every letter of the alphabet? | Hacker News Reader

Nerd quiz - Can you name a programming language for every letter of the alphabet?

9 pointskvogt23 comments

APL, Brainfuck, Cobol, D, Erlang, Fortran, Goedel, Haskell, INTERCAL, Javascript, K, Lisp, Matlab, NewtonScript, OCaml, Python, QBasic, Ruby, Smalltalk, TeX, UnrealScript, Verilog, Wierd, XSLT, Yorick, Z++

Assembly, Bash, C, Dylan, Emacs Lisp, F#, Groovy, Haskell, Icon, Java, K, Lua, Mathematica, Nemerle, Oz, Perl, Qi, R, Scheme, Tcl, UnrealScript, VRML, Whitespace, XQuery, Yorick, Z++

(I tried to pick different PLs than russ if I could think of one, though I admit I didn't know of Yorick or Z++)

Arc, Befunge, C++, Delphi, ECMAScript, FORTH, Guile, Hugo, IDL, J#, Ksh, Lex, Maple, nroff, Octave, PHP, QLISP, RPAL, SQL, TrueBasic, Unlambda, VHDL, WEB, XUL, yacc, ZZT-OOP.

ZZT-OOP! Oh, the nostalgia. That was awesome. Well, not the language. Not the IDE. But the whole idea of a game having a built-in programming language. Was it the first of its kind? (Then again, in 1991, I don't suppose it was.)

JFYI, FORTH is now usually written Forth. (Like LISP is now normally written Lisp.)

Where's the challenge in that? I wanna see a factorial function, iterative and recursive (where applicable), in each. Now that's a nerd.

I'm guessing Trevor and rtm could manage about half the alphabet. pg, not a chance, he's too much of a language bigot.

I'd be lucky to get through maybe five without consulting a reference of some sort.

arc, b, c, dylan, erlang, franz lisp, goo, haskell, interlisp, jscheme, kawa, lisp 1.5, maclisp, newlisp, ocaml, perl, qi, ratfor, scheme, t, uci lisp, verilog, waterloo basic, xlisp, yacc, zetalisp

(Being a language bigot doesn't constrain you too much if your favorite language is a language-family.)

Touché.

Once again, age and guile beats (relative) youth, innocence, and a bad haircut.

Touché. Hehehe...Looks like my challenge should have involved multi-byte encodings, if I wanted to pick on pg. ;-)

Argh. You just had to go and ruin a good jab by fixing the problem. ;-)

Of course, in the reply page, it's still showing up as "TouchÃ©".

What about A, B, C, D, E, F, G, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, Y and Z?

Seriously, they're all real single-letter languages (Google for "[letter] programming language" and wade through the results).

I knew of only about 5 of them already (B, C, D, E, K). I couldn't find real languages for H, I, O or X.

No, but I can P a lot.

Python, PHP, Perl, PostScript, PDF, Pascal, Pict, Pike, PL/1, Prolog.

Don't you love IBM... Programming Language 1... Operating System 2...

I failed:

A: Ada, B: B, C: C, D: D, E: Erlang, F: Forth, G: Gwbasic, H: Haskell, I: Io, L: Lisp, M: Miranda, N: Newtop Script, O: OCaml, P: Perl, Q: Qbasic, R: Ruby, S: Scheme, T: Tcl, U: ?, V: Visualbasic, Z: ?, X: ?, Y: Yacc, W: ?, K: ?

Off the top of my head: Ada, BCPL, C, Delphi, Erlang, Fortran, Godel, Haskell, Intercal, Java, K (if hypothetical languages count? This is a project by some FreeBSD developers to produce a more powerful version of C designed for kernel programming), Logo, Maple, N??, Occam, Pascal, Q??, Ratfor, Sed, TeX, U??, Visual Basic (if this counts as a language in itself rather than as a version of BASIC), Whitespace, X??, Yorick, Z??

I guess that's 19-21 out of 26, depending on the exact rules.

Newlisp, if we're allowed different lisp dialects.

(If not, new challenge: lisp dialect for every letter of the alphabet.)

Paul Graham has most of the work done for me: http://paulgraham.com/lisps.html He has A, B, C, D, E, F, G, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, S, V, and X - though I certainly can name some dialects of the same letters which are not listed. Not going to really bother on that one, though.

This leaves H, Q, R, T, U, W, Y, and Z, of which I can supply Qi ( http://www.lambdassociates.org/ ) and T ( http://mumble.net/~jar/tproject/ ). Bringing the list of unnamed (for me) to:

H, R, U, W, Y, Z.

That's the best I can do. Anyone else?

We couldn't figure out N, U, or Z either.

Q is easy - QuickBasic, under the same theory as V.

Whitespace - good call! We couldn't think of a W.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicon_programming_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubercode http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniface_%28programming_language%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnrealScript_programming_language

(Don't ask me where I got my info)

http://www.nickle.org/

Keith Packard has been working on it for a while...

UML

That's a design language, not a programming language, right? Or is UML actually Turing-complete?

No idea, just thought I'd toss it out there.

Go management!

Justin.tv crew came up with 20.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com