IOCCC Winners Announced

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Posted by Hemos on Monday August 30, 2004 @01:35AM from the begin-the-headache dept.

Arachn1d writes "The IOCCC has finally announced the winners of the 2004 contest.
With winners this year including a mini-OS and a ray-tracer, the submissions should be interesting indeed - if you can make sense of them. According to the page, the actual code for the winners should be up mid-october."

22 of 175 comments (clear)

Windows CE? by wackysootroom · 2004-08-30 01:38 · Score: 4, Funny

Was the Mini-Os Windows CE by any chance? I'd bet that's pretty obfuscated!
Re:Umm by TheShadowHawk · 2004-08-30 01:39 · Score: 5, Funny

Maybe that's the whole point. Everything (including the article) is well... obfuscated.

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If the IOCCC is like the IOC by Omega1045 · 2004-08-30 01:40 · Score: 5, Funny

If the IOCCC is anything like the IOC, I am sure they will ask some of the winners to give back their prizes because of judging mistakes, and probably screwed over several Russian participants.

--
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
Let me be the first to say... by GillBates0 · 2004-08-30 01:41 · Score: 3, Funny

10333 r0x0rzz. 0bf534710n rul3zz!
C0N6R47UL4710N5 W1NN3RZZ!

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An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
1. Re:Let me be the first to say... by Short+Circuit · 2004-08-30 01:45 · Score: 2, Funny
  
  What's really, really scary, is that I could read that just fine...
  
  --
  tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Re:Umm by ophix · 2004-08-30 01:44 · Score: 5, Funny

wouldnt it need to be an UNobfuscated perl code contest? ;}
Time to turn in your geek card... by GillBates0 · 2004-08-30 01:48 · Score: 4, Funny

Every self respecting geek knows what the IOCCC is. By admitting that you don't, you've demonstrated your inability to cope with the rigorous demands of abiding by the high standards of geekiness.
Please hand in your Geek membership card on your way out. Thank you.

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An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
1. Re:Time to turn in your geek card... by stratjakt · 2004-08-30 02:32 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Here's an example of what I'm talking about:
  
  I got a resume from some kid just out of University. He attached some samples of the code he wrote. One of them was the perennial "calendar" app that I think we all were tasked to write.
  
  Anyhow, I was perusing the code. It was pretty sloppy, one-letter variable names, multiple statements crammed together on single lines.
  
  So I get to this one section of code. I can't even remember how it worked now, but it was this convoluded for() statement that flipped a flag and did some weird ass computation. It took me about 10 minutes of "stepping through" it in my head to figure out what it was doing.
  
  It was calculating leap-years. I actually stared at it in shock, imagining how much time and energy this kid spent figuring out the worlds most assinine way to figure out if it's leapyear. I would have just wrote "if (year%4 == 0) { days_in_feb=29; }" or something of the sort. I wouldnt write "if (!(year%4)) {};" because perfoming boolean tests on integers is another pet peeve, it doesn't improve the code, just detracts slightly from its readability.
  
  I actually interviewed the kid, and pointed the lines out to him. I asked him why he didn't just use the modulus operator. He just stared at me blankly. He had no clue what "modulus" meant.
  
  As creative as his "solution" was, his code was bad, and he was a shitty programmer with a very very poor understanding of the language.
  
  It's all cool to have this contest, and if that's how people want to spend their spare time, go ahead. I'm just trying to send a message to the newbies reading slashdot who are still in school and tend to think this is a hallmark of a good coder in the "real world". In the real world or business, anything that makes your day more of a hassle than it needs to be, is a bad thing.
  
  Leave the obfuscation to the marketing department. We have one who actually listed double-ROT13 encryption as a "feature" of our product. Ok, he asked me what encryption we supported by default, and I told him double-ROT13 not realizing just how dense he was. The story gets better! The marketing shpiel he put together was going to the IT security folks at the NSA! One of them called me up, in tears from laughing. He asked if I could implement quad-ROT13. I told him I could implement 2^n-ROT13, iff n>0.
  
  But that's another story for another article.
  
  --
  I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Transcript by k4_pacific · 2004-08-30 01:50 · Score: 4, Funny

Here's an excerpt from the award ceremony:

winner: I won! I won!
MC: No, you're failing computer science.
winner: [Segmentation fault]

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Unknown host pong.
Re:Umm by skribble · 2004-08-30 02:00 · Score: 2, Funny

Apparently even the web site is obfuscated now.

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--- Nothing To See Here ---
IOCCC? or IOC-C-C? by TheShadowHawk · 2004-08-30 02:08 · Score: 4, Funny

Since the Olympics have just finished and still reasonably fresh on my mind, did anyone else read that as a stuttered IOC-C-C? (International Olympic C-C-Committee)

No? J-J-Just me then?

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Friends don't let Friends use Internet Explorer.
Bumper Sticker by pr0nbot · 2004-08-30 02:09 · Score: 3, Funny

Chucklesome bumper sticker mentioned by someone on Slashdot...

"Eschew Obfuscation"
We get an award, too! by justkarl · 2004-08-30 02:12 · Score: 4, Funny

And the Lifetime Acheivement in Server Destruction Award goes to...Slashdot!!! Congratulations!

Seriously, I can practically smell the server melting from here.
I think we just... by kkovach · 2004-08-30 02:17 · Score: 4, Funny

obfuscated their webserver. :-)

- Kevin

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The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act.
Re:Obfuscation by Ford+Prefect · 2004-08-30 02:28 · Score: 3, Funny

How to write obfuscated code in Perl...

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Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Re:Funny, but sickening by Anonymous Coward · 2004-08-30 02:37 · Score: 1, Funny

I would advise you to get some sense of humour:
C has been said to be "a language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly language". For some this appears as an issue (usually marketing people, I would say, but there is this sort of people in education also); other people think that good programming style neither could nor should be enforced by the language itself.
The IOCCC is just another (hilarious) way to state the case.
Raytracing? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-08-30 02:38 · Score: 1, Funny

And here I thought the original raytracing algorithms were already pretty heavily obfuscated on their own, hence their rapid adoption throughout the industry.
Re: Obfuscation by Black+Parrot · 2004-08-30 02:45 · Score: 2, Funny

> For those who don't know what this is all about...

Darn. I clicked it in hopes of seeing pix from the International Olympic Committee Contortionist Competition.

> It's all about how to obfuscate baby!

Was the article text one of the contest entries?

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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
In other news... by KoolDude · 2004-08-30 02:48 · Score: 3, Funny

All prize money for the latest IOCCC have been used up for bandwidth after a %^&*@#@%#^% ( obfuscated ) slashdot effect hit the site soon after results were published. We are sorry for the winners...

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getSexySig(); /* returns sexy signature */
Re:Obfuscation by revividus · 2004-08-30 02:57 · Score: 2, Funny

But I wanted a link to "How to write intelligible code in Perl..." Caveat: I like perl. :-)

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philcrissman.com.
Re:Funny, but sickening by RichardX · 2004-08-30 03:04 · Score: 3, Funny

Just a guess.. but you don't happen to have pointy hair?

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Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
More C-related sillyness by cjellibebi · 2004-08-30 04:04 · Score: 2, Funny

Slightly offtopic, but this will serve the needs of those of us reading this thread for a fix of C-related humour. The Infrequently asked questions in C (C-IAQ)