Software Carpentry Project's First-Round Winners

GenericBoy writes: "The four first round winners for each category of the Software Carpentry competition have been announced. It's really exciting to see all these potential replacements for tools that are in such wide-spread use. If you haven't heard of Software Carpentry yet, they're hosting a competition (for BIG $$$) for developing Free tools in the Configure, Build, Bug-tracking and Testing categories." As source code becomes less and less an obscure concept, it's good to see that some people are working to make its construction less obscure as well.

Comments

Python... but no code?

[Frymaster]

Okay, I admit it's a grand idea... but why have they specified a mandatory language if they insist that entries contain no code? I realize that ultimately, winning proposals will necessitate the writing of code... but since winners are chosen on functionality/interface and not on implementation details why does the language matter? A good flowchart should be equally applicable to all languages and the language should be chosen for reasons of pure implementation expediency.