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9th Annual ICFP Programming Contest Gears Up
Tom7 writes "This year's ICFP Programming Contest is now open for early registration. This is an annual open competition in which hundreds of teams vie to complete a 3-day programming task over the internet. The organizers have promised that this year's contest will be "very different from past competitions" and will have a theme of "computational archaeolinguistics." In addition to prize money, the winner's programming language is declared the "programming language of choice for discriminating hackers;" previous winners have used Cilk, Haskell, C++ and O'Caml. How will your favorite language fare?"
2005: http://icfpc.plt-scheme.org/
2004: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~plclub/contest/
If you want to see how well you might be able to do in this contest, check out previous problems and how other teams solved them.
Rewarding hackers who can whip together a slapdash product instead of those who can make a solid, secure, maintainable design.
Congratulations: you win this year's prize for First Person Not To Have A Clue What The ICFP Contest Is Like.
As the other poster has already commented, the ICFP contests are typically designed to favour solid, secure, and mainainable designs. Anyone who jumps in and starts whipping together slapdash code is doomed to fail ignobly.
Unsurprisingly, nobody has ever won using slapdash "dynamic" languages like Perl, Python, or Ruby. The languages which tend to do well are those like Haskell and OCaml, which attract smart and disciplined people, or C++, which attracts careful and methodical people. ICFP is about extreme design, not extreme programming.
Teams using Dylan, a dynamic language based on Common Lisp, have done very well in the ICFP.
One reason that Haskell and O'Caml have done very well is they are good vehicles for research into typing, hence very popular in theoretical CS. I bet that's the primary relevance of static vs. dynamic typing. I think if the contest existed twenty years ago, there would have been far more Lisp winners than C and Pascal winners.