Get Ready for For The 7th ICFP Programming Contest

nate writes "Convinced your favorite programming language provides unbeatable productivity? Convinced you and your friends are world-class programmers? If so, we're providing you the opportunity to prove it! We are pleased to announce the 7th ICFP Programming Contest to be held in conjunction with ICFP 2004. All programmers are invited to enter the contest, either individually or in teams; we especially encourage students to enter. You may use any programming language (or combination of languages) to show your skill." Read on below for the details.

"On Friday, 4 June at 12:00 Noon (EDT), we will publish a challenge task on the Web site and by e-mail to the contest mailing list. Teams will have 72 hours until Monday, 7 June 12:00 Noon (EDT) to implement a program to perform this task and submit it to the contest judges. We have designed the contest for direct, head-to-head comparison of language technology and programming skill. We have a range of prizes including cash awards and, of course, unlimited bragging rights for the winners.

Previous contests included: 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999 and 1998."

Cool! Oh damn.

[n1ywb]

This looks really cool, a good way to show off your skills. Unfortunately I'm moving that weekend :( Are there any other popular programming contests out there? I remember the 99 bottles of beer contest that got posted here a while back and then never happened. I busted my ass to write my submission in Forth. It was only about 70 bytes and most of that was unavoidable strings like "beer on the wall".

Re: Best maintainer?

[phamlen]

I would love to see a contest where you judge the best "maintainer" of code. Because maintenance programming (taking someone else's code and improving/modifying it) is a totally different beast than orginal programming.

I think an interesting programming challenge would be a multi-phase contest, where each team works on a different team's program in each phase. For instance:
* Phase 1, everyone creates a program to accomplish Goal 1.
* Phase 2, everyone gets someone else's program and must modify it to accomplish goal 2.
* Phase 3, each team takes yet another Phase 1 program and modifies to accomplish goal 3.
* Phase 4, etc...

At the end of the contest, you could determine lots of things:
* Who's the best designer (based on how a phase 1 design did in the later phases)
* Who is the best maintainer (based on how well the team did on goals 2-4)
* If you allow different languages, you might even be able to measure whether one language is more maintainable than other languages...