ICFP 2002 Contest Winners Announced

Georgwe Russell writes "The Winners have been announced at the official web site. Looks like OCaml and functional programming have won again, with the 3 member TAPLAS team. There is somewhat of an upset, though. Second place goes to 3-member team Radical TOO, whose entry was written in C! In the lightning round, the virtues of Python as a quick prototyping language were shown in the lightning division's winning entry by the OaSys one-man team. Does the skill of the programmer prevail over the limitations of the language and paradigm used, or is C nearly as good a language as OCaml?"

Comments

No; C matters.

[Anonymous Coward]

99% of all code written can be written better faster (run and dev times) in a language other than C. C should only be used when an abstract model of memory cannot do the job. That is, if you need control over the way your data and code is laid out in physical memory, use C. Otherwise, use something else. One more thing: in

int i = 1, j = 2, k;

k = i/j;

k does not equal 0, OK? One over two is the fraction 1/2, and not 0. If you're writing code like this, you are an idiot. Only idiots are contrained by the machine. Geniuses think like people and use languages that understand enough of math to arrange their types (strictly or no) in a tower instead of as disjoint sets of static rules that make it easier to write compilers instead of software. I do not care how hard it is for open source geeks to write compilers anymore than a user cares how hard it was to write a browser in C.
Programmers use compilers, and compilers should allow programmers to think abstractly instead of like a machine.

1/2 = 1/2, not 0. GET IT FUCKING STRAIGHT, YOU MORONS.