This programming trivia quiz has 50 free questions with answers and covers the languages and the culture around them: who created C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Go, Rust, Swift, Kotlin, PHP, Perl, Fortran, COBOL, Lisp, BASIC, Pascal and TypeScript, where their odd names came from, and the mascots, mottos and in-jokes that grew up around them. It also digs into coding culture and its famous disasters: the moth in the Harvard Mark II, Dijkstra's letter about goto, the Mars Climate Orbiter unit mix-up, the Ariane 5 overflow, the eleven-line npm package that broke the internet, why Git is called Git, and how Stack Overflow got its name. It suits developers, students and anyone who has ever fixed a bug by explaining it to a rubber duck. Every answer was checked against the relevant Wikipedia article and cites the sentence that establishes it, and the difficulty runs from first-week-of-bootcamp to questions that will stump senior engineers.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which programmer created the C language at Bell Labs in 1972?
Dennis Ritchie
Its first job was writing utilities for Unix, and it was soon used to rewrite the Unix kernel itself.
Q 02Brendan Eich created JavaScript in 1995 while working at which company?
Netscape
Eich was originally hired to embed the Scheme language in the browser, then told to build something that looked like Java instead.
Q 03When JavaScript first shipped in a browser beta in September 1995, what was it called?
LiveScript
The switch to the JavaScript name in December rode the hype around Java during the dot-com boom, and Eich has called it a marketing ploy.
Q 04Who designed the Java language at Sun Microsystems?
James Gosling
It was released in May 1995 with the promise that programmers could write once and run anywhere.
Q 05Java was initially named after a tree standing outside its creator's office. Which tree?
Oak
The name changed before the 1995 release, and the language later passed to Oracle when it bought Sun in 2010.
Q 06Bjarne Stroustrup began work in 1979 on the predecessor of C++. What was it called?
C with Classes
It was briefly called C84 in 1982 before the C++ name stuck; the first edition of The C++ Programming Language followed in 1985.
Q 07The name C++, suggested by Rick Mascitti, refers to which feature of C?
the increment operator
It is a small joke: the language is C, plus one.
Q 08In 2018 Guido van Rossum took a 'permanent vacation' from which Python community title?
Benevolent Dictator For Life
He first released Python in 1991 as version 0.9.0, and the name comes from Monty Python's Flying Circus.
Q 09Yukihiro Matsumoto said one factor in naming Ruby was that it was a colleague's what?
birthstone
Ruby 0.95 was first announced on Japanese newsgroups in December 1995, and interest surged a decade later with Ruby on Rails.
Q 10Go was designed in 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson at which company?
It was announced publicly in November 2009 and is often called Golang after its old golang.org domain, though its proper name is Go.
Q 11Graydon Hoare created Rust in 2006 while at which organisation, its sponsor from 2009?
Mozilla
Rust 1.0, the first stable release, arrived in May 2015.
Q 12Rust enforces memory safety without a garbage collector using which compile-time mechanism?
the borrow checker
It tracks the lifetime of every reference at compile time, so data races and dangling pointers are rejected before the program ever runs.
Q 13Swift, introduced at Apple's 2014 WWDC, was created to replace which older Apple language?
Objective-C
Chris Lattner started work on it in July 2010, and Apple open-sourced it under the Apache 2.0 licence in December 2015.
Q 21As of 2020, COBOL ran background processes for roughly what share of credit or debit card swipes?
95%
The language dates from 1959, when CODASYL designed it partly on Grace Hopper's FLOW-MATIC for a Department of Defense effort.
Q 22John McCarthy's Lisp, begun in 1958, takes its name from which phrase?
List Processor
It is the second-oldest high-level language still in common use, and all its code is written as parenthesised s-expressions.
Q 23John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz created BASIC in 1964 at which school?
Dartmouth
Their goal was to let students outside the sciences use computers.
Q 14The Kotlin language is named after what kind of place?
an island in the Gulf of Finland
JetBrains open-sourced it in 2012, and it became the preferred language for Android development in 2019.
Q 15Before it became a recursive backronym, what did the letters PHP originally stand for?
Personal Home Page
Rasmus Lerdorf started it in 1993 as a handful of CGI programs written in C, and today it stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
Q 16The elePHPant, PHP's official mascot, is what colour?
blue
Vincent Pontier designed it in 1998 after noticing the letters PHP look like an elephant when viewed sideways.
Q 17Who developed Perl in 1987 as a Unix scripting language to make report processing easier?
Larry Wall
Its motto is 'There's more than one way to do it', pronounced Tim Toady, and it has been called the Swiss Army chainsaw of scripting languages.
Q 18In October 2019, Perl 6 was officially renamed to what?
Raku
The split let Perl 5 continue as simply Perl while the sister language went its own way.
Q 19The name Fortran comes from a phrase describing what the system did. What phrase?
Formula Translation
It is still used to benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers.
Q 20Which IBM engineer proposed and led the team that delivered the first Fortran compiler in 1957?
John Backus
His pitch was a practical alternative to assembly language for the IBM 704 mainframe, and the code it produced was good enough to win over assembly programmers.
Q 24Micro-Soft's first product, a BASIC interpreter, was written for which computer?
Altair 8800
MITS released it on punched tape, and Monte Davidoff co-wrote it with Gates and Allen.
Q 25Which Swiss computer scientist designed Pascal, released in 1970?
Niklaus Wirth
It became the main development language for the Apple Lisa and early Macintosh, and Turbo Pascal made it a hit on PCs.
Q 26Which lead architect of C# and creator of Turbo Pascal also worked on TypeScript at Microsoft?
Anders Hejlsberg
TypeScript went public in October 2012 as version 0.8 after two years of internal development.
Q 27The earliest known 'hello, world' program appears in Brian Kernighan's 1972 tutorial for which language?
B
It was there to illustrate external variables; the 1978 book The C Programming Language later made the phrase a universal first test.
Q 28Rubber duck debugging takes its name from an anecdote in which book?
The Pragmatic Programmer
Explaining code line by line to something that cannot answer back often makes the mistake leap off the screen.
Q 29In 1947, operators of the Harvard Mark II logged the 'first actual case of bug being found'. What was it?
a moth
The insect was taped into the log book, though Thomas Edison had already used 'bug' for small faults back in 1878.
Q 30Edsger Dijkstra's famous 1968 letter argued which statement should be considered harmful?
goto
He said unrestricted jumps made it terribly hard to find meaningful coordinates to describe a program's progress.