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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?"
Finally, VB can get the recognition it deserves.
During the previous contest, the U of C organizers wanted to make sure that the winner used solid programming techniques than spit out a 3-day hack fest. They had contestants make a program - and then after they submitted their program, the rules changed and they had to make additions to their program. Pretty slick if you ask me.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
If you want to write viruses and easy-to-use hacking tools -- yes. Look, Perl is the glue for *nix. However, thanks to Microsoft's object models, VB/VBA/Visual Studio Tools for Office is the probably more the Window hackers tool of choice that many would care to admit. Of course, how many respectable 'hackers' hack Windows?
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
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.