LiveCoda, Real-Time Coding Competition

Robert Shelton points out this "debrief" from ESCI LiveCoda 2006, a live programming competition. From the article: "On Wednesday the 24th of May at Loop Bar in Melbourne (Australia) fourteen teams of programmers gathered for the first ESCI LiveCoda real-time programming competition. Possibly the first performance based real-time programming competition. Before a packed night club with live music, each team had just ten minutes to write a program which could correct a corrupted image." (Here's a mirror of the LiveCoda site).

Comments

"How long, O Lord?"

[Black Parrot]

Why this fascination with speed?

When are people going to start programming contests where the award is given for something that's actually useful, such as fewest bugs, most readable, best re-use of existing code, etc?

Re:"How long, O Lord?"

[Ed Avis]

Competitions already are judged on 'fewest bugs'. Indeed, some competitions disqualify any entry that has any bugs found in testing. But all the other criteria you suggest are subjective. I think speed is a pretty good judge of programmer ability; someone who can hack up a correct program in 10 minutes stands a good chance of writing a correct, clear and maintainable program in an hour.

Re:Did the choice of language affect the results?

[Fahrenheit 450]

But for something like this, you're mainly limited by the contestants' familiarity with the problem domain.
With this particular competition (which looks to consist of reading in a simple image format, like PPM then applying a couple of simple transformations then writing the new file back out), the code isn't going to be too terribly different between most languages, and therefore the higher expressiveness of something like Python or OCaml wouldn't really get a chance to shine.

Re:This is what people actually believe?

[joebob2000]

The counter-generalization: The speedy ones are usually exceptionally smart, but their code is completely unmaintainable, no matter how much time they are given to write it, because the other 9/10ths don't understand the code enough to maintain it. Of course this is the fault of the 1 smart programmer. Why? because they are outnumbered 9 to 1. The exception? when the smart programmer becomes VP of engineering.

I know plenty of smart, fast programmers that write clear code and follow the rules. Sometimes the best ones will write something that most others have a hard time following, not because it is "sloppy", but because they are more talented. They also find and fix plenty of bugs that the other 9/10s made in their "maintainable" code. I have seen times where a super programmer correctly debugs a regular programmer's code in a design review sight unseen, just from the description. I have also seen regular programmers say "I checked it", or argue with a super programmer, until he gives up in and takes 10 minutes to find the bug and fix it himself.

What's my point? I don't have one, except maybe don't be a hater just because you can't hit the ball like Tiger Woods.