8th Annual ICFP Contest

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."

Comments

Not a bad exercise!

[nhnfreespirit]

We actually did just this as an assignmet in a software engineering class a while back. We had to write a simple life simulator, and then a new assignmet was handed out that changed the original specifications.

The last part of the assignment was to make our life-forms compatible with that of at least one other group. This last part proved quite interesting as, even though the critters were technically compatible with the other groups environment, many of the assumptions our two groups had made about the world (such as sight radius of each creature, how much food a creature needs, how fine grained the world was...) made the creatyres behave rather weird.

Still, it is a good way to be forced to write code that is easy to refactor from start!

Wow

[CastrTroy]

This is just like in real life. Design a program to spec, and then 1 day before launch, change the requirements. Is this the kind of activity we should really be promoting? Maybe we should give well laid out requirements, and whoever follows them the best, wins. Not only would following the requirements be important, but also not exceeding the requirements, and adding a bunch of stuff that wasn't asked for, would cause you to lose points.

Re:Wow

[NoseBag]

Is this the kind of activity we should really be promoting?

You answered your own question in your first sentence: "This is just like real life."

Humans (and spec writers, too!) make mistakes and sometimes overlook aspects of a desired requirement that are important. Recognising this and being ready to deal with it is part of the job for any professional in any industry.

Re:Wow

[CastrTroy]

I do realise thats its kind of important to make a program that can easily be changed to meet changing requirements. Even if it follows spec, and does what the customer wants today, within 3 months, the customer will want it to do a bunch other things, or do some things differently.

I was just kind of pointing out that this contest brings to light one of the most frustrating parts of designing software in the first place. This is one of the things that makes it so hard to get right. If you told a civil engineer to build a bridge, and then half way through building it, told him you wanted it to hold twice as many cars, and be a draw-bridge, instead of a suspension bridge, well, I think that he would basically have to start over from scratch, and the project would of course be over budget, and take longer then originally expected. With software, there is less of an impact, but people still have to realize the real impacts of trying to change things at the last minute. People who don't really know much about software will look at competitions like this, and think that they don't really have to worry about changing requirements, because programs can be changed easily, without any ill effects.