ICFP 2001 Contest Results

Phil Bewig writes: "Results of the 2001 ICFP Programming Contest (previously mentioned at SlashDot here and here) have been announced. First place is to a program in Haskell, second place is to a program in Dylan, and the judges' prize is to a program in Erlang. The judges also named third place (ocaml) and fourth place (C) entries that were not awarded prizes. ICFP Programming Contest pages for prior years are available: 2000, 1999, and 1998."

Comments

Re:Haskell, eh?

[cthugha]

I really recommend that you do sit down with Haskell. IMO, the judges were correct in naming it language of choice for "discriminating hackers". It has:

• clean, simple syntax (parentheses are used only to override default infix operator precedences, nothing more), including excellent list construction and comprehension;
• a strong object-oriented type system which ensures that the vast majority of coding errors result in a type error (although it can take a little while to get used to Haskell's type system);
• lazy evaluation of expressions: only the parts of your program needed to produce a result are evaluated, which allows you to write programs that left to run would produce infinite computations (e.g. programs to calculate the Fibonnaci series or the sequence of primes) and only evaluate them for the subset of data you need; and
• partially applied (or curried) functions: you really need to see these in practice, particularly in conjunction with the standard list-processing functions (e.g. map, scan, and fold) to understand their true power (the ability to create lists of partially-applied functions is very cool, although I have no idea how such things might be used).

With regard to your qualms about lack of use, I understand Ericsson have created their own functional language for in-house use (the name escapes me). Arguably, since we've all got oodles of processor power to spare, there's no reason not to use functional languages in the general applications sector, given their greater reliability.

If you want more info on Haskell, check out the official website (especially the Ode to Haskell on the humour page, which should give you an idea as to the language's feature set ;)). There you will find interpreters, compilers and other tools for a variety of platforms (incl. Windows and Linux) as well as complete documentation.