Sample Programs 100 Languages Release

Just before thanksgiving, I made my first formal release of the Sample Programs repository because we finally reached 100 languages. Let’s talk about how we got here.

Table of Contents

Launching the Project

I launched the Sample Programs project just 3 days before my wedding as an idea for 100 Days of Code. I thought maybe I could write a Hello World program with a brief article every day for 100 days, but that quickly became exhausting. In addition, I found that there were already several Hello World collections, so I didn’t feel like I was doing anything unique.

That said, I was having a lot of fun exploring languages that I had never even heard of such as Red, Wren, and Scala. However, at some point, the little Hello World in Every Language project began to outgrow itself.

Eventually, I decided to open up my project to other types of programs like fibonacci, factorial, and fizz buzz. At the same time, I abandoned the 100 Days of Code commitment, so I could focus on much more long term goals for the project.

Getting Some Help

Unfortunately, I had one major problem: I needed help to sustain the project. As a possible solution, I tried to leverage social media, but that ended up being a waste of time.

That was until I stumbled upon Ben Halpern’s twitter profile. See, I had been following a lot of tech folks with the hope that they may be interested in helping out with the project, but nothing was going my way. At some point, I ended up following Ben who founded dev.to, a tech community website.

Over time, I noticed that Ben would do weekly posts where developers could share their open-source projects, so I figured why the hell not? After dropping my project in the comments, I started to get a steady flow of contributors.

Thanks to Ben, I probably have 5 or so regular contributors which is insane to me. Overall, I’ve had 58 contributors as well as 99 stars and 78 forks since launching the project. I’d say that’s a very successful project for starting from nothing.

Of course, I don’t think the project really got the exposure it needed until October when I started to leverage Hacktoberfest, an annual pull request event. Just by tagging a few issues, I was able to get a wealth of contributors over the span of that month. In fact, the influx of contributions forced me to rework the project several times.

As a reaction, we began enforcing a program requirements file before we allow new program contributions. In addition, we launched a GitHub Pages site which hosts all of our documentation in the same repo. All-in-all, October had been very good to us.

Hitting 100 Languages

Well, I can’t exactly write an article declaring the 100 languages accomplishment without writing about it, so let’s take a look!

As of November 22nd, 2018, we’ve officially collected enough code snippets to cover 100 programming languages. Here’s the official list:

• Agda
• Abap
• ALGOL68
• Ada
• AppleScript
• Bash
• Befunge
• Brainfuck
• Ballerina
• C++
• Crystal
• COBOL
• C*
• C#
• C
• Carp
• Chapel
• Clipper
• Dart
• Dale
• D
• Dg
• Elixir
• Emojicode
• Egison
• Elm
• Elena
• Eve
• Erlang
• Fetlang
• Ferret
• Felix
• Forth
• FORTRAN
• F#
• Factor
• Frege
• Gravity
• Goby
• Google Apps Script
• Go
• Groovy
• Golo
• Haskell
• Hack
• Idris
• JavaScript
• Java
• Julia
• Koka
• Kotlin
• Kitten
• Lily
• Lolcode
• Lua
• Lisp
• Little
• MoonScript
• MojiScript
• MATLAB
• Nim
• Never
• Owl Lisp
• Orc
• Opa
• Objective C
• OCAML
• Octave
• Odin
• PHP
• Python
• PowerShell
• Pascal
• Pony
• PicoLisp
• Perl
• Pyret
• Quack
• Rust
• Ring
• Rexx
• Red
• Ruby
• R
• Racket
• Solidity
• Swift
• Shen
• Scala
• Scheme
• Smalltalk
• Tcl
• Tex
• TypeScript
• Vimscript
• Verilog
• Visual Basic
• Wren
• Wu
• Wyvern

If you’re interested in more information like the number of snippets or number of articles per language, check out the official release on GitHub.

Looking Ahead

Naturally, I can’t help but look ahead as I continue to watch the project grow. At 100 languages, we’ve just barely scratched the surface, so why would we stop now?

Coming up, I expect to publish a release for 250 code snippets by the end of the year. If I’m lucky, I might hit 100 articles as well, but we’ll see. In either case, expect another article like this one.