Building a Programmer’s Rosetta Stone

Mike Mol writes “Rosetta Code aims to be the Rosetta Stone of programming. The Rosetta Stone allowed scholars who understood classical Greek and/or Egyptian demotic text to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics previously undecipherable by presenting the same message in all three forms. Linguistic scholars could then map content between the three messages.

Rosetta Code aims to do the same thing for programming languages by presenting programming tasks which visitors and regulars solve using any programming language they know. People who may know one or two of the languages used to solve the task can then see how that task is done in a language they’re trying to learn.

Currently, over 30 different tasks have been solved in 50 different programming languages, and the numbers grow every day.

Rosetta Code was born of my disgust of the ubiquitous programming task used by tutorials and books to demonstrate user output.

The site runs on the MediaWiki wiki software, and all content is covered under the GNU Free Documentation License.

The site is a project of the Grand Rapids Community College Computer Club. We were kindly offered free hosting and bandwidth by the people behind Geekalize, a social networking site for geeks.”