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ICFP 2003 Programming Contest Results
An anonymous reader writes "The previously reported ICFP Contest has been over for quite some time. The results were announced on August 26, 2003 at the conference in Uppsala, Sweden, yet the contest organizers have yet to publish results. Despite the forgetfulness of the organizers, it is known that this year C++ did well, taking first and second, but not judge's prize. Interestingly, a one-man team consisting of an undergraduate student took first place, followed by a team of highly ranked 'red' TopCoders, with the maintainers of Gwydion Dylan taking judge's prize."
That's not entirely fair. There are lots of places where functional programming is the way to go. You'd be surprised at how much stuff you "real programmers" come up with that the FP world did better, more cleanly, and years ago. XML and XSLT come to mind, as well as some of the weirdness they've begotten.
Its really a matter of what kind of programming you are doing. FP is all about making algorithms primary and data secondary. There are some applications where this fits. Take, for example, parsers. In writing a parser, you've only got to deal with a few tokens at a time. Try writing a Scheme parser in imperative vs functional style and tell me which one is shorter and cleaner. However, in some applications, data is the only important thing. Take, for example, an OS kernel. In a kernel, most work boils down to finding highly efficient data structures to track certain state, and writing highly efficient algorithms that mutate that state. Functional programming isn't a good fit for this --- its is often very difficult to express algorithms in a pure-functional manner that have the same asymptotic complexity as their imperitive counterparts.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Funnily enough, I came away with the impression that C++ had an advantage this year, since the removal of the requirement that the judges run the program themselves meant, in theory, that a brute-force approach combined with a supercomputer could have beaten the most delicately honed algorithm imaginable. That the winner was not an example of this surprised me.
Ah well. Those of us with functional inclinations can console ourselves with the knowledge that at least the winning program didn't use COBOL...
Yes, it is. It allows you to both program close to the hardware and on an abstract level. The focus is on efficiency.
But sometimes you want other goals first. In case of concurrent and fault tolerant programming I would rather use Erlang. For GUIs you can hack it together quicker if you rely on Java and its excellent development tools.
It is rather amusing to see the functional programming zealots beaten in their own competiition.
I don't mind. What I mind is that organizer did not officially publish the results. I sent several emails. No reaction. :(
Perhaps the problem posers got tared and feathered after the conference for posing a problem that was more suited to imperative programming. :-)
Now maybe the FP "movement" will go back to relative obscurity where it belongs, and let the real programmers do their jobs.
I hope you mean the F1rst P0st crowd, otherwise I have to consider you being an ignorant idiot.
Regards,
Marc