The Pointless Programming Language Reference is a multi-lingual reference that helps programmers switching from one language to another.  It currently has 396 common programming tasks with 1,875 solutions in 7 languages (including English for extra descriptions of tasks).  Python and Chicken Scheme are both over 90% complete, Javascript has solutions for over 66% of tasks and 50% are available in C.  Also notable is Lispy, a toy interpreter I wrote, which can complete over 40% of these tasks.

An API to include the PLR within your own project/site is in development.  Most of the API is implemented, however I want to do some testing before releasing it and keeping all interaction on Sourceforge is desirable at the moment.

Visit the Pointless Programming Language Reference.

View some notes about the PLR.

The system consists of 2 parts:

1. A script that produces an XML representation of the database.
2. A script that accepts <change/> snippets and applies them to the database

The database is stored as a git repository so all changes are tracked individually.  However due to a limitation of most free/low cost hosts that prevent shell access (for commands like ‘git commit’), changes must be written to a local file which is not under version control.  To get around this limitation all changes are also written to a change log file.  Periodically an off-site script downloads the change log, applies the changes to the git repo one-by-one, clears the change log and replaces the server version of the database with the updated version.

xml.py?languages
An xml file representing the contents of the database.  Other sites can use this to display the PLR in their site/application.  Use the languages parameter to restrict the xml to a subset of languages.

change.py?id&name&comment&code&links&add&language
A script that accepts change data and writes that data to the database.  The change is also written to a change log file.

** This implementation and API are still under active development and are subject to change at any time.  A small subset of this functionality is currently implemented, with the rest to come over the next few days.  Contributing via this API before it is stable is guaranteed to lead to lost data.  I will announce when the API is stable.

The problems are broken into categories, such as Strings, Lists and Functions. Currently there are 4 languages to choose from Chicken Scheme, Python, Javascript and C, and there are over 1,100 solutions.

Check out the Pointless Programming Reference.

I’m also planning to do something like this for widget toolkits (Qt, Gtk, etc) at some point in the future.