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.

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

[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.