The 20th IOCCC Winners Announced 34
An anonymous reader writes "The 20th International Obfuscated C Code Contest ended on February 5th, 2012, and the list of winners has been announced. According to the page, the source code for all the winning entries 'has not been released yet.' It will be available alongside code from previous years 'in late-February to mid-March.'"
Re:What's the point?.... (Score:5, Insightful)
(This is my first car analogy on
real obfuscation (Score:5, Insightful)
The best way to get real code obfuscation is to outsource VB.Net development to a third-world country. Seeing indexed property calls and casting in lambda expressions in VB.Net is already unsettling, but when the variable names are in a foreign language (or event better: foreign language in all uppercase) it is a treat, especially with random patches of On-Error-Gotos and line numbering.
Re:What's the point?.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Other than flexing your geek.
Deliberately writing obfuscated code can make you a better coder; you can look at the tricks you're using to make it hard to read and think "I have to make sure never to do anything like that in production code." One of the most valuable programming exercises I ever did, suggested as an "on your own time" project by one of my CS professors, was to write some short but moderately functional program (I think I did a scheduling simulator) without comments and with one-letter variable names, and then look at it again a few months later to see if it made sense. The answer: no, it didn't, and I considered the couple of hours I put into it to be time well-spent.
If you are writing code that looks anything like this in a team environment you'll be fired in a week.
Ah, idealism! Such a beautiful thing. Hold onto that for as long as you can, before the cruel world shatters your illusions.