ROAR.exe
This is the course code for "INTRO-COMPUT SCI/PROG IN JAVA" at Columbia.
What is COMS1004?
This American Navy Admiral and computer scientist is credited with inventing the first compiler and popularizing the term "debugging" after finding a moth trapped in a relay of the Harvard Mark II computer.
Who is Grace Hopper?
This American inventor is famous for developing the first practical incandescent light bulb and founding General Electric.
Who is Thomas Edison?
Created in 1993 by Urban Müller, this famously minimalist language uses only eight single-character commands like +, -, and >.
What is Brainfuck?
This large, gray mammal is the only animal that can’t jump.
What is an elephant?
This inventor of a popular programming language teaches at Columbia as of 2022.
Who is Bjarne Stroustrup?
She wrote what is considered the first computer algorithm, designed for Babbage’s Analytical Engine.
Who is Ada Lovelace?
Completed in 1883, this New York City landmark was one of the first steel-wire suspension bridges ever built.
What is the Brooklyn Bridge?
In this 2001 language by Karl Hasselström, programs are written as if they were plays by the Bard — complete with characters, acts, and scenes.
What is Shakespeare Programming Language (SPL)?
The Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest coral reef system, is located off the coast of this country.
What is Australia?
These are the course codes for the undergraduate and graduate Topics in Computer Science courses.
What are COMS4995 and COMS6998?
This U.S. Department of Defense project, launched in the late 1960s, is widely recognized as the precursor to the modern Internet.
What is ARPANET?
This British and Scottish physicist’s 19th-century equations unified electricity and magnetism, forming the foundation of modern electromagnetic theory.
Who is James Clerk Maxwell?
This language’s programs look like sentences about cats — using words like “meow,” “purr,” and “hiss” to represent operations.
What is Cat?
The ancient city of Troy, once thought to be a myth, was excavated in the 19th century in this modern-day country.
What is Turkey?
This Columbia theoretical computer scientist is one of the current record holders for fast matrix multiplication.
Who is Josh Alman?
Developed at AT&T Bell Labs in 1969 by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, this operating system laid the foundation for Linux and macOS.
What is UNIX?
In 1903, these two brothers achieved the first controlled, powered, and sustained flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
Who are Orville and Wilbur Wright?
This 1998 esolang, named after a circle of Hell, was designed to be as difficult to program in as possible — even writing “Hello, World!” took years.
What is Malbolge?
This planet, discovered in 1846, was the first to be located using mathematical predictions rather than direct observation.
What is Neptune?
This is Advanced Programming lecturer Jae Lee’s son.
Who is Adrian Lee?
This English mathematician’s paper (full name, including middle) on “computable numbers” introduced the concept of a theoretical machine that became a cornerstone of modern computation.
Who is Alan Mathison Turing?
Known as the “father of information theory,” this mathematician’s 1948 paper introduced the concept of the bit and transformed electrical engineering into a communication science.
Who is Claude Shannon?
In this esolang, programs are arranged on a 2D grid, and the instruction pointer can move left, right, up, or down — turning program flow into a maze.
What is Befunge?
This chemist, who was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize for his work on the nature of the chemical bond, is the only person to ever win two unshared Nobel Prizes, later winning the 1962 Peace Prize for his campaign against nuclear testing.
Linus Pauling