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:ICFP not a programming language comparison

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Functional/declarative langauges are great where bug-free precision is required because you specify what the results *are* rather than the steps required to produce the result. I'd feel much more comfortable with my mission-critical stuff written in Haskell than C/C++.

That's a fair point. Playing devil's advocate somewhat, I'll contend that a purely functional paradigm can be more awkward for certain types of job than a procedural language such as C. Note the number of "functional" languages that now offer heavyweight extensions beyond strict lambda calculus style functionality as a result. In those extensions is found extra power, but also some of the risks present in the other languages.

Being slightly more objective, I agree that for a 0% bug rate, C and C++ are not the solution (and I am a professional C++ programmer, so I have no axe to grind here). The catch is that most (not quite all) real-world programs can tolerate a 0.01% bug rate instead, and that can be reasonably achieved by a competent programmer in non-functional languages as well. At that point, the correctness argument loses a lot of its weight, and you have to consider many other factors as well. Like I said before, which language is most useful often depends deeply on the context in which it will be used.