Super Hyperpolyglot

A few years ago nearly all the code I wrote was in C++, but increasingly I’m finding myself writing in a variety of mostly C-style languages and having to perform crunching mental gear changes as I switch between them.

In the interests of making these language switches less painful I thought about listing the commonly used features of the languages I commonly use in a side-by-side format. Luckily I’m a lazy programmer, the web is large and there’s nothing new under the sun, so I quickly found Hyperpolyglot which provides commonly used programming language features in a side-by-side format, which is what I wanted. Nearly.

Hyperpolyglot organizes it’s language comparisons in to several catagories: scripting languages, C++ family languages, embeddable languages and so on. In my case (and I suspect in many cases) the languages I wanted to compare were spread across several pages.

After briefly considering some cut and paste to get what I wanted I started playing with Google Spreadsheets, which has a very nifty importHtml function which allowed me to pull the Hyperpolyglot data in to several sheets which can be combined to produce arbitrary language comparisons.

It’s not perfect as different languages have different features and in some cases the Hyperpolyglot data doesn’t use exactly the same terms across tables (“version used” vs “versions used”) and I’m not a spreadsheet ninja, but it’s good enough to generate PDFs like this JavaScript Python Java C++ Comparision. As a Hyperpolyglot derivative work, The Super Hyperpolyglot Spreadsheet is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License, please let me know if you improve it.