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Test your knowledge around programming - history, programming languages, acronyms and a bit of boolean algebra.

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A Quiz To Take On 256th Day Of The Year

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (née Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852), also known as Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation.  
  
  
The coding language **Ada** is named after her.

What British woman is considered to have written the first ever piece of computer software, developing an algorithm for Charles Babbage’s theoretical Analytical Engine in the 1840s?

Pascal is an imperative and procedural programming language, designed by Niklaus Wirth as a small, efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring. It is named after French mathematician, philosopher and physicist Blaise Pascal.

This computer programming language was introduced by Niklaus Wirth in late 1970. What is the name of the language that was named after a famous French mathematician?

In mathematics and in computing systems, a binary digit, or bit, is the smallest unit of data. Each bit has a single value of either 1 or 0, which means it can't take on any other value.

In binary computing there are two important numbers. One of them is zero. What is the other number?

What would be the decimal value of binary 1111 1110?

Bubble sort is a simple sorting algorithm that repeatedly steps through the input list element by element, comparing the current element with the one after it, swapping their values if needed. These passes through the list are repeated until no swaps have to be performed during a pass, meaning that the list has become fully sorted. The algorithm is named for the way the larger elements "bubble" up to the top of the list.

What is the simplest sorting algorithm called?

FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation) computer programs have been written to support scientific and engineering applications, such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, geophysics, computational physics, crystallography and computational chemistry. It is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers.

One of the earliest computer programming languages was introduced by IBM in 1957. The aim of the language was to help with translating mathematical formulas into machine understandable code. What is the name of this language?

The language was initially called Oak after an oak tree that stood outside Gosling's office. Later the project went by the name Green and was finally renamed Java, from Java coffee, a type of coffee from Indonesia.

What is the programming language developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and named after the type of coffee from Indonesia?

Apple introduced Swift in 2014 as a modern alternative to Objective-C. Its goals were to be easier to debug than Objective-C. Swift syntax is easier to read, and requires less code to do the same amount of work.

Apple introduced this language publicly in the summer of 2014 and emphasized how quickly it works. What is the name of this rapid programming tool?

O'Reilly has been doing animal covers on their computer books for quite some years. When the first Programming Perl went to print, a camel was choosen.  
  
Not everyone is very happy with this association. The association is trademarked after all, and it does serve a commercial interest - for instance, non O'Reilly Perl books don't carry camels.

What programming language developed by Larry Wall is associated with a camel, the image that appeared on the language's first programming manual printed by O'Reilly back in 1991?

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications.

What does EC2 (Amazon) acronym stand for?

Did you know some languages don't have a built-in "break" functionality? For example in Scala, "break" is an implemented method that works by throwing an exception, and not a language feature.

Sometimes the programmer may wish the loop to terminate before it has finished executing completely. What word is used in many languages to end the loop early?

There are a few situations when this is desired behavior. For example, the games on cartridge-based game consoles typically have no exit condition in their main loop, as there is no operating system for the program to exit to; the loop runs until the console is powered off.

When creating a loop, the programmer usually needs to be careful that their loop does not run forever. What is the term used to describe a loop which never stops?

No one seems to know why it's "elif":  
  
\- may be spanish "El if" (_the_ if)  
\- it is 4 letters which matches 4-letters "else" and fits nicely with the default 4 space indentation

Which of these is a Python control flow statement type?

Remember, CAPSLOCK is optional, but SELECT looks way cooler than select.

Which SQL command would you use to retrieve a record or records from the database?

Who is the creator and primary maintainer of Perl?

Old game consoles, like NES, used 8-bit processors.  
The earliest IBM PC used the Intel 8088 processor, a 16-bit processor with an 8-bit bus.  
  
  
  
Now the common user is using 64-bit processors.  
  
  
  
Think of the progress: from 8-bit registers holding integer values ranging from -128 to +127, to 64-bit registers working with integers from -9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to +9,223,372,036,854,775,807.

What is the common term used to describe computers with processors using registers of 1-byte?

The default assistant in the English version was named **Clippit**. Although the name Clippit was used in all versions of Microsoft Office that supported the Office Assistant feature, the assistant became commonly referred to by the public as **Clippy**, a name which later occasionally bled into Microsoft marketing materials.

What was the name of the default "Office Assistant" that appeared in Microsoft's Office suite of software, beginning with MS Office 97?

MS-DOS was the main operating system for IBM PC compatibles during the 1980s, from which point it was gradually superseded by operating systems offering a graphical user interface (GUI), in various generations of the graphical Microsoft Windows operating system.

Used as the primary operating system for IBM PCs during the ‘80s, the “DOS” in Microsoft DOS stands for \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ Operating System.

In computing, BIOS (Basic Input/Output System), also known as the System BIOS, ROM BIOS, BIOS ROM or PC BIOS) is firmware used to provide runtime services for operating systems and programs and to perform hardware initialization during the booting process (power-on startup).

BIOS is the first software that runs when a computing system is powered on. What do the “I” and the “O” stand for in the acronym BIOS?

Windows 98 sold an estimated 58 million licenses and saw one major update, known as Windows 98 Second Edition (SE), released on June 10, 1999.  
  
After the release of its successor, Windows Me (Millenium Edition) in 2000, mainstream support for Windows 98 and 98 SE ended on June 30, 2002, followed by extended support on July 11, 2006 along with Windows Me's end of extended support.

An updated version of Windows 98 had “SE” after it. What was SE short for?

Netscape Navigator is a discontinued proprietary web browser, and the original browser of the Netscape line, from versions 1 to 4.08, and 9.x.  
It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and was the dominant web browser in terms of usage share in the 1990s, but by around 2003 its user base had all but disappeared.  
This was partly because the Netscape Corporation (later purchased by AOL) did not sustain Netscape Navigator's technical innovation in the late 1990s.

In 1994, which computer company launched its first web browser, Navigator?

Originally based on the NCSA HTTPd server, development of Apache began in early 1995 after work on the NCSA code stalled.  
  
Apache played a key role in the initial growth of the World Wide Web, quickly overtaking NCSA HTTPd as the dominant HTTP server.  
  
  
According to The Apache Software Foundation, its name was chosen "from respect for the various Native American nations collectively referred to as Apache, well-known for their superior skills in warfare strategy and their inexhaustible endurance".

What free, open-source, cross-platform web server software took inspiration from Native American culture for its name?

The tradition of using the phrase "Hello, World!" as a test message was influenced by an example program in the 1978 book **"The C Programming Language"**, with likely earlier use in BCPL.  
  
  
The example program from the book prints "hello, world", and was inherited from a 1974 Bell Laboratories internal memorandum by Brian Kernighan, **"Programming in C: A Tutorial"**  
  
  
The C-language version was preceded by Kernighan's own 1972 **"A Tutorial Introduction to the Language B"**, where the first known version of the program is found in an example used to illustrate external variables:

At Bell Labs in 1972, a programmer named Brian Kernighan wrote a code snippet in his “A Tutorial Introduction to the Language B”. This tutorial is the first known instance of a famous two-word phrase used in countless programming tutorials. What is the phrase?

There are always the same number of digits as the base name implies. Since we always use zero, the highest digit is one less than the base name.

A number base is the method we use to display and process numbers. Since we have 10 fingers we probably developed our number system based on 10 different digits. What digits are used in the octal system (octal means eight)?

A stack is just what it sounds like. You put things on top of it (you "push" them onto the stack), and you take things back off the top (you "pop" them off the stack). So when you push 1, 2, 3 onto a stack in that order, the 1 is at the bottom and the 3 is at the top. So when you pop them back off, you will first get the 3, then the 2, and finally the 1.

If you have an empty stack that can contain numbers, and you push numbers **1, 2, 3** onto it, what order will they be in when you pop them off?

The format for hexadecimal color is #RRGGBB. The color red has 255 (FF in hexidecimal) red pixels and no green or blue pixels.

Which hexadecimal combination displays the color red?

The computer inserts a zero on the right after shifting all bits left. As we are working with binary values, adding a zero to the end of a binary number is equivalent to multiplying the binary number by binary 10, or two.  
  
  
A computer inserts a zero to the left and dumps the rightmost bit after a shift right, which is equivalent to halving the value (and rounding down).

A computer can shift bits left or right in a register. A one-byte register with 0011 0100 would contain 0110 1000 after a left bit-shift. What is this doing to the value stored in that register?

The bit-wise AND operation compares each bit position in one register to each bit position in the other register. That same position in the result is 1 only if the bit of one register AND the bit of the other register are both 1. In other words 1 AND 1 is 1, 1 AND 0 is 0, 0 AND 1 is 0, and 0 AND 0 is 0.

What do you think the result of a bit-wise AND operation between 0110 and 1110 would be?

The bit-wise OR operation compares each bit position in one register to each bit position in the other register. That same position in the result is 1 if either the bit of one register OR the bit of the other register is 1. In other words 1 OR 1 is 1, 1 OR 0 is 1, 0 OR 1 is 1, and 0 OR 0 is 0.

What do you think the result of a bit-wise OR operation between 0110 and 1110 would be?

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