October Programming Challenge: Ranking American Heroes

Oct 5, 2011 by Jian    2 Comments    Posted under: Code, Monthly Contest

At the beginning of each month, I follow the update of TIOBE Index very closely. TIOBE Index is a measurement of popularity of programming languages based on the result of search engines. By the way, SAS ranks 24 there last month. The way TIOBE Index is defined inspires me so I come up with the following game to play for this month:

Use any programming language you feel comfortable to rank the popularity of the following American heroes (each picture contains a link pointing to its Wikipedia entry):

Send me your source code by 31/10 to win a $25 gift card.

As for our previous challenge Motto of Hogwarts School, the winner is Jiangtang Hu. This is Jiangtang’s second time to become the winner of our Programming Challenge. Congratulation! His method is to tap into an online Latin-English dictionary. Other contenders approach this problem by using Google translate or digging into the search result. As said last time, the Google Translate does not give a correct answer. For example, the following perl one-liner
use LWP::UserAgent;$ua=LWP::UserAgent->new;$ua->agent('Mozilla/6.0');
print $ua->request(HTTP::Request->new('GET','http://translate.google.com/translate_a/t?client=xxxxxxx&text=draco%20dormiens%20nunquam%20titilandus&sl=la&tl=en'))->content;
returns “the dragon never sleeping titilandus” in the JSON format. To me the most Q&D solution is found in the following perl one-liner:
use LWP::UserAgent;$ua=LWP::UserAgent->new;$ua->agent('Mozilla/6.0');
foreach(split /\n/,($ua->request(HTTP::Request->new('GET','http://www.google.com/search?&q=draco+dormiens+nunquam+titillandus')))->content){
if(/mean/i){s/]*>//g,s/^.*means\s+&quot\;([^&]*)&quot\;.*$/\1/;print;}}

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