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IOCCC 2006 is now open
leob writes "The 19th International Obfuscated C Code Contest opened one minute before the New Year to qualify for the 2006 designation. Entries accepted until the end of February. Start writing and submitting your entries now!"
They could always create an International Obfuscated AJAX competition, then every entrant could be a winner.
Either I'm dumber than I had hoped, have worked with nimwitted programmers, or (much more likely) most AJAX implementations are just completely illogic to follow. When reviewing "Web 2.0" work, I often miss the logic and structure of C.
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I for one find it appalling that only C is allowed. What about Plus or Sharp? They have the same rights as the high and mighty C does. What this amounts to is pure and simple racism. This brings us right back to the coding rights movement of the 80's. I cannot believe we are still struggling.
I'm so mad, I'm calling Jess-C Jackson. He'll get Al #ton on the phone as well.
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Having the 2006 competition run in 2007...
It's like they are setting out to create a contest that is unclear and needlessly difficult to understand.
A contestant would submit a piece of code together with the specification of what the code was supposed to do, but no other documentation.
The judges would propose a straightforward change in the specification.
The code and the revised specification would be given to an impartial panel of a hundred programmers, selected at random from the ranks of people working for a living writing code. Each of them would be asked to modify the code to meet the revised spec. They would also be instructed to fix any bugs they noticed in the code they were given. The revised code and spec would then submit each one to an impartial panel of 100 SQA testers, selected at random from the ranks of people who work for a living testing code.
The winner would be the contestant whose code, after being modified by other programmers, passed the largest number of SQA tests.
(And, yes, SQA failures due to unfixed bugs in the original code would count against the contestant).
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That's probably a good way to lose since creativity is one of the key factors, not just plain illegibility. Take, for example, this program (one of my all-time favorites) which prints out the value of pi:
http://www0.us.ioccc.org/1988/westley.c
Or this one which, when compiled and run, prints out another character as program source. You compile the output to that, run it and it outputs another character as program source. You compile that, and you get back the original program's source:
http://www0.us.ioccc.org/2000/dhyang.c
And given the space constraints, your program should be quite clever and compact itself even before you try and obfuscate it.
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Okay, the 2006 "Explanation of Why IOCCC Is Not Just Ugly Code" is now underway.
The winning entries are pieces of art, not pieces of dung. They look like they should do one thing, but they do another. They arrange the code in a visually pleasing but maintenance-proof way. They choose some concept and take it to the absurd limit, all within a tiny amount of code.
My favorite past entry is John Tromp's maze generator. In seven lines of code, he produces random mazes. The variables are named M, A, Z, E instead of useful functional mnemonics. The source code is formatted to LOOK like a maze. And even in this maze which is the source code, the passages in the maze spell out the word 'maze.' This is not just putting a pig on the lipstick, this is making the pig look *good*.
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C or C++ code is often only unreadable to people who have had their brains scrambled by languages like Common Lisp and Scheme.
So? The fact that some management types think scheme proves exactly what?
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