Slashdot Mirror
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."
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!
Hmm. Two weeks to complete a project, followed by a changed spec the day before going live.
sounds like some of my clients.
There are some comments already saying "if the program could be written in three days, couldn't they write a new one from scratch in one day?" The answer is that a very fast programmer probably could. But what would the point be? The object of this exercise is to show off just how generic a program written in a functional language can be. It really is possible to abstract everything, leading perhaps to the famous paradox "Everything can be solved by adding another layer of abstraction, except having too many layers of abstraction."
Putting that aside, I think this is a great idea for a competition. I hadn't heard of it before this one, and have only recently got into functional programming myself. I'm a new-found convert to ML, and find it interesting to be forced to think about a problem in a completely new, and usually recursive, way. ML also has some imperative elements but I prefer to avoid them as far as possible. I'll attempt to make an entry to this contest, although I doubt I'm at the relevant level of expertise yet.
I'd be interested to hear what languages other Slashdotters think would be most appropriate to a contest like this. Lisp gurus, start your engines!
apterous.org