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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?"
This year's ICFP task, as well as last years, was all about finding a good algorithm. More than anything else, knowing the domain would help. Of course, using a language that provides strong typechecking (like OCaml) or garbage collection (OCaml, Python) allows a programmer to concentrate on the main task. You should not draw too many conclusions from the language that was used for the winning entries.
At the beginning was at.
That about clinches it. A lot of people really look down upon those who use any coding language that in any way simplifies the coding. The way I've always seen it is thus:
Visual Basic is a very nice language for coding GUI-based applications. Newer versions have increased speed and performance such that there's not really a difference (exempting the included DLL's) between a standard office-type app made in VB and one in C++. If you want to get complicated and rip into the windows API, then you're probably doing something that may require C++, but VB often even handles this nicely. It interfaces much more nicely with the C-based DLL's than it used to in the past.
My biggest peeve is the syntactical differences in compative operators and math. There was a time when I love VB, but now I truly hate having to do a "myvar = myvar+1", or the fact that you can't do something like "var1=var2+var3" (in VB that would give a boolean).
In arguement for VC++, the wizards can handle a lot of the windowing/GUI stuff for you. I think that if if gave you some nice understandable error messages when you screwed up things might be a lot nicer. (it sucks when you get an ambiguous error message on line 2023 caused by a mistake on line 101).
Since I've learned C++, I prefer it when possible. I have no huge qualms about writing a GUI in VB, or even a hybrid project with C++ DLL's linked to my VB GUI's. Every coder has their place. Just because one can program C and Fortran doesn't make them any better than a VB programmer. In a timed-trial for a small GUI app, the VB programmer would likely stomp the C progammer.
If only MS could program better error messages... Error on line 342: unknown thingamabobber executing blingconfangler - phorm