Programming Languages Quiz
Python, JavaScript, Java, C and Rust: 15 questions on who built the languages that run the world and why.
Which programming language, created by Guido van Rossum, is named after a British comedy troupe rather than a snake?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Python
Van Rossum began Python in late 1989 and released the first version in 1991, naming it after Monty Python's Flying Circus because he was reading the scripts at the time. The official documentation is full of spam and eggs references.
Python's design principles are listed in The Zen of Python, which appears when you type import this into the interpreter.
Which language did Brendan Eich create at Netscape in 1995, reportedly in about ten days?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
JavaScript
Eich wrote the first version of JavaScript in roughly ten days in May 1995 for the Netscape Navigator browser. It was briefly called Mocha and then LiveScript before Netscape renamed it to ride the Java hype.
Despite the name, JavaScript has almost nothing to do with Java; the official standard calls the language ECMAScript.
Dennis Ritchie developed which programming language at Bell Labs in the early 1970s?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
C
Ritchie created C between 1972 and 1973 to rewrite the Unix operating system, and it has shaped almost every language since, including C++, Java, C# and JavaScript. He co-wrote the classic textbook The C Programming Language with Brian Kernighan.
The book introduced the Hello, World! program, which has been the traditional first program in nearly every language since 1978.
Who created C++, originally known as C with Classes?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Bjarne Stroustrup
Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup began C with Classes at Bell Labs in 1979 and renamed it C++ in 1983, a nod to the increment operator. It added object-oriented features to C while keeping its speed.
Stroustrup has joked that there are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.
Which language was developed at Sun Microsystems by James Gosling and was originally called Oak?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Java
Gosling named the language Oak after a tree outside his office, but a trademark clash forced a change before the public launch in May 1995. The coffee-inspired name Java came out of a brainstorming session.
Java's mascot Duke was created in 1992 for the Star7 handheld prototype, three years before the language was announced.
Which language did Apple introduce at WWDC in June 2014 as a modern successor to Objective-C?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Swift
Chris Lattner began Swift in secret in 2010 and Apple unveiled it on June 2, 2014, with Craig Federighi calling it Objective-C without the C. Apple open-sourced Swift in December 2015.
Lattner also created LLVM, the compiler framework that underpins Swift, Rust, Clang and many other modern toolchains.
Which 1957 IBM language is generally considered the first widely used high-level programming language?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Fortran
Fortran, short for Formula Translation, was developed by a team led by John Backus at IBM and released in 1957. It let scientists write formulas instead of machine code and is still used in weather and physics simulations.
COBOL followed in 1959 for business computing, and Lisp in 1958, making the late 1950s the big bang of programming languages.
Which language did Google make an officially supported Android development language at its I/O conference in 2017?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Kotlin
Google announced first-class Android support for Kotlin on May 17, 2017, alongside Java and C++, and two years later declared Android development Kotlin-first. The language was created by JetBrains and first appeared in 2011.
Kotlin is named after Kotlin Island near Saint Petersburg, Russia, where JetBrains had a development office.
Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto released which programming language in 1995?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Ruby
Matsumoto designed Ruby in Japan to be a language that made programmers happy, blending ideas from Perl, Smalltalk and Lisp. It became famous worldwide after David Heinemeier Hansson released the Ruby on Rails web framework in 2004.
Rails powered early versions of Twitter, GitHub, Shopify and Airbnb, which helped cement Ruby's reputation for fast startup development.
Which language was created at Google by Rob Pike, Ken Thompson and Robert Griesemer and announced in 2009?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Go
The three designers started Go in 2007, partly out of frustration with C++, and Google released it on November 10, 2009. Its goroutines and simple syntax made it popular for cloud software such as Docker and Kubernetes.
Ken Thompson had already co-created Unix and the B language, and Rob Pike co-designed the UTF-8 encoding with him.
When Rasmus Lerdorf released PHP in 1995, what did the letters originally stand for?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Personal Home Page
Lerdorf wrote PHP as a set of Personal Home Page Tools in C to track visits to his online résumé. When Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans rewrote the engine for PHP 3 in 1998, the name became the recursive PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
PHP still runs a huge share of the web because WordPress, Wikipedia's MediaWiki software and early Facebook were all written in it.
Which programming language is named after a 17th-century French mathematician and philosopher?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Pascal
Niklaus Wirth released Pascal in 1970 and named it after Blaise Pascal, who built one of the first mechanical calculators in the 1640s. Pascal became the standard teaching language of the 1970s and 1980s.
Ada is named after Ada Lovelace, Haskell after logician Haskell Curry, and Erlang after Danish mathematician Agner Krarup Erlang.
Rust reached its 1.0 release in May 2015 after years of sponsorship by which organisation?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Mozilla
Graydon Hoare started Rust as a personal project in 2006, Mozilla began sponsoring it in 2009, and version 1.0 shipped on May 15, 2015. Rust's ownership system prevents memory bugs without a garbage collector.
Rust has been voted the most admired language in the Stack Overflow developer survey every year since 2016.
Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of Turbo Pascal and C#, led the design of which Microsoft language released in 2012?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
TypeScript
Microsoft released TypeScript 0.8 on October 1, 2012, after two years of internal work. It adds optional static types to JavaScript and compiles to plain JavaScript, and it now underpins Angular, VS Code and much of the modern web.
Hejlsberg wrote the original Turbo Pascal compiler in Denmark in the early 1980s before Borland licensed it and later hired him.
WhatsApp's server backend is famously written in which language, originally developed at Ericsson for telephone switches?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Erlang
Erlang was created at Ericsson in 1986 for highly reliable telecom systems, and WhatsApp used it to handle millions of simultaneous connections per server with a tiny engineering team. The company had only about 50 engineers when it reached 900 million users.
Elixir, created in 2011, runs on the same Erlang virtual machine and is used by Discord and Pinterest.
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All Technology quizzes →About the Programming Languages Quiz
JavaScript was written in about ten days. Java was nearly called Oak. Python takes its name from a comedy troupe, not a snake. Behind every programming language is a person, a year and usually a good story, and this quiz collects 15 of the best.
You will be asked who created C, C++, Python, Ruby, Go, Swift, Kotlin, Rust and TypeScript, what PHP originally stood for, which language is named after a French mathematician, and which one quietly runs WhatsApp. The early questions suit anyone who has written a line of code; the later ones are for developers who enjoy language history as much as syntax.
You will find 15 multiple choice questions here, each with four options. Difficulty: Hard. Most people finish in about 6 minutes, and every answer comes with a short explanation and one extra fact worth keeping.
How to play
Read the question and pick one of the four answers. The correct answer is revealed straight away with a short explanation, then press Next question to keep going. At the end you get your score out of 15 and a full review of your round. Play again any time and the questions arrive in a fresh order. There is no timer and no account.
Good to know before you play
Which programming languages appear in this quiz?
Python, JavaScript, Java, C, C++, Swift, Kotlin, Fortran, Ruby, Go, PHP, Pascal, Rust, TypeScript and Erlang, with questions on their creators, release years and naming stories.
Do I need to know how to code to play?
No. The questions are about history and trivia rather than syntax, so anyone interested in technology can play, though programmers will have an edge.
Were the dates verified?
Yes. Release years and creator names were checked against official language sites, company announcements and reference sources before publication.
Answer key: all 15 questions with explanations
- Which programming language, created by Guido van Rossum, is named after a British comedy troupe rather than a snake?
Python Van Rossum began Python in late 1989 and released the first version in 1991, naming it after Monty Python's Flying Circus because he was reading the scripts at the time. The official documentation is full of spam and eggs references. Python's design principles are listed in The Zen of Python, which appears when you type import this into the interpreter. - Which language did Brendan Eich create at Netscape in 1995, reportedly in about ten days?
JavaScript Eich wrote the first version of JavaScript in roughly ten days in May 1995 for the Netscape Navigator browser. It was briefly called Mocha and then LiveScript before Netscape renamed it to ride the Java hype. Despite the name, JavaScript has almost nothing to do with Java; the official standard calls the language ECMAScript. - Dennis Ritchie developed which programming language at Bell Labs in the early 1970s?
C Ritchie created C between 1972 and 1973 to rewrite the Unix operating system, and it has shaped almost every language since, including C++, Java, C# and JavaScript. He co-wrote the classic textbook The C Programming Language with Brian Kernighan. The book introduced the Hello, World! program, which has been the traditional first program in nearly every language since 1978. - Who created C++, originally known as C with Classes?
Bjarne Stroustrup Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup began C with Classes at Bell Labs in 1979 and renamed it C++ in 1983, a nod to the increment operator. It added object-oriented features to C while keeping its speed. Stroustrup has joked that there are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses. - Which language was developed at Sun Microsystems by James Gosling and was originally called Oak?
Java Gosling named the language Oak after a tree outside his office, but a trademark clash forced a change before the public launch in May 1995. The coffee-inspired name Java came out of a brainstorming session. Java's mascot Duke was created in 1992 for the Star7 handheld prototype, three years before the language was announced. - Which language did Apple introduce at WWDC in June 2014 as a modern successor to Objective-C?
Swift Chris Lattner began Swift in secret in 2010 and Apple unveiled it on June 2, 2014, with Craig Federighi calling it Objective-C without the C. Apple open-sourced Swift in December 2015. Lattner also created LLVM, the compiler framework that underpins Swift, Rust, Clang and many other modern toolchains. - Which 1957 IBM language is generally considered the first widely used high-level programming language?
Fortran Fortran, short for Formula Translation, was developed by a team led by John Backus at IBM and released in 1957. It let scientists write formulas instead of machine code and is still used in weather and physics simulations. COBOL followed in 1959 for business computing, and Lisp in 1958, making the late 1950s the big bang of programming languages. - Which language did Google make an officially supported Android development language at its I/O conference in 2017?
Kotlin Google announced first-class Android support for Kotlin on May 17, 2017, alongside Java and C++, and two years later declared Android development Kotlin-first. The language was created by JetBrains and first appeared in 2011. Kotlin is named after Kotlin Island near Saint Petersburg, Russia, where JetBrains had a development office. - Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto released which programming language in 1995?
Ruby Matsumoto designed Ruby in Japan to be a language that made programmers happy, blending ideas from Perl, Smalltalk and Lisp. It became famous worldwide after David Heinemeier Hansson released the Ruby on Rails web framework in 2004. Rails powered early versions of Twitter, GitHub, Shopify and Airbnb, which helped cement Ruby's reputation for fast startup development. - Which language was created at Google by Rob Pike, Ken Thompson and Robert Griesemer and announced in 2009?
Go The three designers started Go in 2007, partly out of frustration with C++, and Google released it on November 10, 2009. Its goroutines and simple syntax made it popular for cloud software such as Docker and Kubernetes. Ken Thompson had already co-created Unix and the B language, and Rob Pike co-designed the UTF-8 encoding with him. - When Rasmus Lerdorf released PHP in 1995, what did the letters originally stand for?
Personal Home Page Lerdorf wrote PHP as a set of Personal Home Page Tools in C to track visits to his online résumé. When Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans rewrote the engine for PHP 3 in 1998, the name became the recursive PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP still runs a huge share of the web because WordPress, Wikipedia's MediaWiki software and early Facebook were all written in it. - Which programming language is named after a 17th-century French mathematician and philosopher?
Pascal Niklaus Wirth released Pascal in 1970 and named it after Blaise Pascal, who built one of the first mechanical calculators in the 1640s. Pascal became the standard teaching language of the 1970s and 1980s. Ada is named after Ada Lovelace, Haskell after logician Haskell Curry, and Erlang after Danish mathematician Agner Krarup Erlang. - Rust reached its 1.0 release in May 2015 after years of sponsorship by which organisation?
Mozilla Graydon Hoare started Rust as a personal project in 2006, Mozilla began sponsoring it in 2009, and version 1.0 shipped on May 15, 2015. Rust's ownership system prevents memory bugs without a garbage collector. Rust has been voted the most admired language in the Stack Overflow developer survey every year since 2016. - Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of Turbo Pascal and C#, led the design of which Microsoft language released in 2012?
TypeScript Microsoft released TypeScript 0.8 on October 1, 2012, after two years of internal work. It adds optional static types to JavaScript and compiles to plain JavaScript, and it now underpins Angular, VS Code and much of the modern web. Hejlsberg wrote the original Turbo Pascal compiler in Denmark in the early 1980s before Borland licensed it and later hired him. - WhatsApp's server backend is famously written in which language, originally developed at Ericsson for telephone switches?
Erlang Erlang was created at Ericsson in 1986 for highly reliable telecom systems, and WhatsApp used it to handle millions of simultaneous connections per server with a tiny engineering team. The company had only about 50 engineers when it reached 900 million users. Elixir, created in 2011, runs on the same Erlang virtual machine and is used by Discord and Pinterest.
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