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

ICFP not a programming language comparison

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Before everyone runs out and says "Haskell is the best programming language", as seemed to happen with things like OCaml in the past, please bear in mind that the ICFP tasks are somewhat biased toward functional languages. It is principally a contest for functional programmers, after all. This year's task, in particular, seems to be particularly suited to the built-in features of many such languages -- more so, perhaps, than things like the ray tracer task in the past.

It's to the credit of the coders that they produce such impressive results so fast, and it'll certainly be interesting reading when the full details are out. But let's not try to read too much into it this time, OK? Haskell is not suddenly a million times better than OCaml was last year, just because OCaml doesn't feature in the top list this time around. Functional programming still may not be the best approach for writing low-level instrument control code or operating systems.

So, before the millions of posts start arriving, I make a small plea: don't treat this as an objective (no pun intended) programming language comparison!

Re:ICFP not a programming language comparison

[Blackheart2]

Boy, you sound nervous! If this were the "Object-oriented programming language contest," and C++ and Python and Eiffel won, I wonder if you wouldn't be saying just the opposite.

No one (at least, no one associated with the contest) is saying this is an objective comparison of programming languages or that the winners are the best programming languages for any and all purposes. Indeed, the prize-winners' appelations ("language for discriminating hackers") are so laughable, no one in his right mind would take it seriously.

This contest is about having fun, taking pride in your favorite language, giving a few kudos where they are deserved, and a little bit of advocacy for a class of programming languages that are overlooked by the programmer community at large. It's not a pissing contest.

BTW, what is an "objective" language comparison anyway? I am a programming language researcher, and I can think of a few theoretical ways to compare programming languages, but I would think that most programmers-in-the-trenches would be more satisfied with tests that compare languages on real life problems, and these contest problems are not far off from that. So what are you so unhappy about?

Re:Different ways of scoring

[Blackheart2]

You neglect to mention the significant fact that the ranking on that page only takes into account the first round results.