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8th Annual ICFP Contest

Posted by Zonk on from the push-the-button,-frank dept.

mauricec writes "Think your favorite programming language is the best one out there? Put it to the test in this year's International Conference on Functional Programming's annual Programming Contest. The contest is coming up in a little under 4 weeks! This year's competition rewards programmers who can plan ahead. As before, we'll announce a problem and give you three days to solve it. Two weeks later, we'll announce a change to the problem specification and give you one day to adapt your program to the new spec. More info on the contest and prizes is on the contest's web page."

4 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Plan ahead? by Markus+Persson · · Score: 4, Informative
    Refactoring does not change behavior.

    Prediction: more people in this thread will make that mistake.

    --
    If the cat can't experience its own death, nothing will ever kill you. (No, really!)
  2. Re:Is rewriting cheating? by JonyEpsilon · · Score: 2, Informative
    From the prizes page:
    The judges' prize will be awarded to a team that produces reasonably competitive entries and, in the judges' opinion, has the most effective re-use of their first submission.
  3. Re:Wow by jjc2222 · · Score: 3, Informative
    You are getting "procedural" programming confused with "functional" programming. Functional languages generally refer to languages that concentrate on the evaluation of expressions with no side-effects rather than statements that modify data. Examples of functional languages are:

    Note that C and Pascal are decidedly not examples of programming languages designed for functional programming. Wikipedia's page is a decent starting point for learning about this.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programmin g/
  4. Abstraction by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative
    because functional languages are not very abstract.

    Mod parent down. If you read his other posts, you will see that he is confusing functional languages (ML, Haskell, Scheme) with procedural languages (C and Pascal). Unlike procedural languages, functional languages, with roots in the lambda calculus, are very abstract to the degree that people often complain they are too abstract to be useful.

    The parent poster makes the same mistake in nearly all of his posts under this article. Watch out.