80 Programming Languages Trivia Questions with Answers

80 public questions with answers, drawn from the well. How many can you answer?

Intermediate Intermediate difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language introduced block structure and lexical scoping in its 1960 report?

Answer

ALGOL 60

Easy Easy difficulty.
Programming Languages

In which year was Python 1.0, the first major release of the Python programming language, published?

Answer

1994

Hard Hard difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which language did Objective-C borrow its object model from?

Answer

Smalltalk

Intermediate Intermediate difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which language was the first high-level programming language developed for scientific and engineering calculations?

Answer

Fortran

Intermediate Intermediate difficulty.
Programming Languages

What was the original name of the SQL database language?

Answer

SEQUEL

Easy Easy difficulty.
Programming Languages

What does BASIC originally stand for in the name of the programming language?

Answer

Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code

Easy Easy difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which island inspired the name of the Kotlin programming language?

Answer

Kotlin Island

Intermediate Intermediate difficulty.
Programming Languages

At which 2014 event did Apple introduce the Swift programming language?

Answer

WWDC 2014

Intermediate Intermediate difficulty.
Programming Languages

What standardized name does the JavaScript language use in international specifications?

Answer

ECMAScript

Easy Easy difficulty.
Programming Languages

Who created the Ruby programming language?

Answer

Yukihiro Matsumoto

Easy Easy difficulty.
Programming Languages

What comedian’s troupe inspired the name of the Python programming language?

Answer

Monty Python

Hard Hard difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language was created by Bjarne Stroustrup at Bell Labs and first called “C with Classes”?

Answer

C++

Hard Hard difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language did Niklaus Wirth design and publish in 1970 as a simpler successor to ALGOL 60?

Answer

Pascal

Intermediate Intermediate difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language did Graydon Hoare create, with Mozilla’s sponsorship, for memory safety and systems programming?

Answer

Rust

Intermediate Intermediate difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language was standardized by a committee in 1990 and named after a legendary mathematician?

Answer

Haskell

Intermediate Intermediate difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language reached its first stable 1.0 release in 2015 after being sponsored by Mozilla?

Answer

Rust

Intermediate Intermediate difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language did Donald Chamberlin and Raymond Boyce develop at IBM for relational databases?

Answer

SQL

Hard Hard difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language did Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie use to help rewrite Unix at Bell Labs?

Answer

C

Hard Hard difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language was standardized in 1998 from research by Philip Wadler and others at Glasgow and Yale?

Answer

Haskell

Intermediate Intermediate difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language did JetBrains announce in 2011 and later make Google’s preferred Android language?

Answer

Kotlin

Intermediate Intermediate difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language did Charles H. Moore develop for an observatory data-acquisition system around 1970?

Answer

Forth

Hard Hard difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language was created by Ary Borenszweig, Juan Wajnerman, and Brian Cardiff?

Answer

Crystal

Easy Easy difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language did Evan Czaplicki create for interactive web applications?

Answer

Elm

Hard Hard difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language did Andreas Rumpf create and first release in 2008?

Answer

Nim

Intermediate Intermediate difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language was created by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s?

Answer

Objective-C

Intermediate Intermediate difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language was designed by Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Viral Shah, and Alan Edelman?

Answer

Julia

Intermediate Intermediate difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language did Rich Hickey create and first release in 2007?

Answer

Clojure

Easy Easy difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language did Google unveil in 2011 for client-side web and mobile development?

Answer

Dart

Hard Hard difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language did Xavier Leroy and Damien Doligez help create at INRIA as an object-oriented successor to Caml?

Answer

OCaml

Hard Hard difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language was created by Niklaus Wirth and first appeared in 1988 as a successor to Modula-2?

Answer

Oberon

Hard Hard difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language did Walter Bright create and first release in 2001?

Answer

D

Intermediate Intermediate difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language did James Strachan create in 2003 for the Java platform?

Answer

Groovy

Easy Easy difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language did José Valim create in 2011 for the Erlang virtual machine?

Answer

Elixir

Easy Easy difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language did Cleve Moler create in the late 1970s as a matrix calculator for numerical computing?

Answer

MATLAB

Intermediate Intermediate difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language did Martin Richards create at the University of Cambridge in 1967?

Answer

BCPL

Intermediate Intermediate difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language did Kenneth E. Iverson develop at IBM and describe in his 1962 book A Programming Language?

Answer

APL

Easy Easy difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language, first released in 1987, was designed by Larry Wall as a general-purpose language for text processing?

Answer

Perl

Easy Easy difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language did John Backus and his team create at IBM in 1957 as the first widely used high-level language?

Answer

Fortran

Easy Easy difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language, created at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, pioneered object-oriented programming with a graphical user interface?

Answer

Smalltalk

Easy Easy difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language, designed by John McCarthy in 1958, introduced automatic memory management through garbage collection?

Answer

Lisp

Intermediate Intermediate difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language was designed in 1959 by the Conference on Data Systems Languages?

Answer

COBOL

Intermediate Intermediate difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language did Donald Knuth create for high-quality mathematical and scientific typesetting?

Answer

TeX

Intermediate Intermediate difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language did Anders Hejlsberg create at Microsoft and first release in 2000 for the .NET platform?

Answer

C#

Easy Easy difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language did James Gosling create at Sun Microsystems as a class-based alternative to C and C++?

Answer

Java

Intermediate Intermediate difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language did Bertrand Meyer design and first release in 1986 with built-in design by contract?

Answer

Eiffel

Intermediate Intermediate difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language did Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman develop at MIT in 1975 as a minimalist Lisp dialect?

Answer

Scheme

Easy Easy difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language did Rasmus Lerdorf create in 1994 for managing his personal website?

Answer

PHP

Intermediate Intermediate difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language was created by John Backus and his team at IBM for mathematical formula translation?

Answer

Fortran

Intermediate Intermediate difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language, created by James Gosling, was first named Oak before being renamed?

Answer

Java

Intermediate Intermediate difficulty.
Programming Languages

Which programming language did Google unveil in 2011 for building applications for its web platform?

Answer

Dart