The Underhanded C Contest Is Back 88
Xcott Craver writes "After several years of inactivity, the Underhanded C contest has returned. The object is to write a short, readable, innocent-looking computer program that nevertheless performs some evil function for reasons that are not obvious under code review. The prize is a $200 gift certificate to ThinkGeek."
The deadline is July 4th, so get to hacking.
Thanks Barry... (Score:4, Interesting)
We learned more in analyzing errant code, then writing out own,
and we could turn crap code into cool programs.
He called one snippet 'Recalcitrant' and we ran upstairs in the library to look it up,
People thought we were mad when we were laughing at the dictionary.
Thanks Barry both for showing us C, and for introducing us to GNU.
Re:Here's an idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Contests that are impossible are not much fun.
To say nothing about why your any hardware requirement is impossible this caught me:
sits an untrained user in front of the app, and it behaves exactly as expected.
The largest software and hardware vendors have been at that since commercial computing began. They all still have to offer end user support and or build a community around the product to support users.
You talked up specs; and then want to offer the product to untrained users. Specs are great for things where the end user is another program or a person who *is* trained and knows what they wanted in the first place; can understand the specs themselves for the most part and therefor hasn't got unrealistic expectations about what the program will and won't do.
'Specs' for end user applications though don't carry that sort of weight and won't save you from the LUSERS. Access is the perfect example. I actually rather like it. There are lots of occasions where you want to trap and manipulate smallish data sets to see something while working on a problem. Given Windows usually hasn't got tools like, cut, paste, diff, comm, join, (useful version of ) sort, uniq, grep, awk, and sed installed Access makes a marginally suitable replacement.
Nobody would suggest discarding your RDBMs and just keeping ALL your data in flat text files. Microsoft never claimed Access was designed to handle the data volume and complexity to be the ERP for your Medium sized business either. Yet lots of people try or at least tried. I haven't seen that as much in recent years. Still they were shocked, shocked, I tell you when they hit the walls.