Eiffel Programming Contest Results

Berend de Boer writes "NICE, the nonprofit International Consortium for Eiffel, has announced the results of its fifth International Eiffel Programming Contest. This year had cash prizes of up to 1400 USD and software valued up to $8000 USD. There were 17 entries. The top scores were:ePalm, bringing Eiffel to PalmOS; ewg, generating C code binding glue; and Hbchess, a chess engine."

Comments

Pity

[Euphonious Coward]

It's a shame they didn't get submissions that would have suggested relevance for the language -- i.e., programs that demonstrate the language used to do something actually useful. As it is, they were obliged to award (1) a platform port, (2) an adapter to call code in some other language, and (3) something for playing games. All are (no doubt) fine efforts, but none of them would make anyone not already committed to Eiffel feel a need to look into it.

The unison program written in OCaml does a job not done by any other program I know of, does it well, and has inspired many to look into the language. Freenet inspired me to install a JVM to try it out. (I deleted both based on the experience, but that doesn't detract from the lesson -- I did try it.) The number of really useful programs written in Perl far exceeds the merits of the language itself, but continues to inspire new users. Python came from behind, but the deep value of many of the programs written in it ensured its enduring success.

To demonstrate the value of an obscure language, don't write yet-another text editor, IRC client, or RSS aggregator. We don't need any more, and we will feel no desire to try yours. Write something useful that's hard to write in other languages, or (better) hard to write in any language. The obscure language will get some (much-needed) reflected credit from the effort, and if it really helps, that will become evident (only!) when people are inspired to read the code.

Re:Pity

[sporty]

To demonstrate the value of an obscure language, don't write yet-another text editor, IRC client, or RSS aggregator. We don't need any more, and we will feel no desire to try yours. Write something useful that's hard to write in other languages, or (better) hard to write in any language. The obscure language will get some (much-needed) reflected credit from the effort, and if it really helps, that will become evident (only!) when people are inspired to read the code.

Nothing is hard to write.. it's usually just tedious. Given 5 years, I'm sure I can write a browser that is a mimic of opera and what have you. Showing simple solutions, i.e. a text editor, an email client, a clock (since that's graphical) shows what can be done in a language without having to deal with developing a complex architecture. Architectures tend to be unique to the situation and reverse engineering the patterns without an overhead view is quite tedious in itself.

Re:Pity

[Euphonious Coward]

Of course anything already done will be easy to copy. Anything interesting, by definition, demands serious thought. Actually coding it might not be very hard, once you figure out what, precisely, it should do, but that's the hard part. The question, then, is how natural it is to express. If the program does the Right Thing, the code to express it should be beautiful, if the language is any good. People inspired to look will see that.

It's silly to code another clock, because it won't matter how beautiful the code is, nobody will read it. Nobody needs another damned clock. Write something useful and meaningful. If you can't think of anything useful and meaningful, and you write a damned clock instead, all you're demonstrating is that you can't think of anything. What does that say about you, as a representative of the fledgling user community for your obscure language?

Maintainability

[Xtifr]

My understanding (which is admittedly shallow) is that the main benefit of Eiffel over most other compiled (or not) OO languages is the added maintainability provided by its "Design by Contract" features. (Not to mention the enhanced readability gained by not being based on C.) Unfortunately, "maintainability" is a bit of a difficult feature to show off in a programming contest. Although it's a pretty important feature in the Real World(tm).