The 17th IOCCC is Now Open!

SimonCooper inputs: "Are you frustrated with software bloat? If so then you might want to consider submitting a little something to The 17th International Obfuscated C Code Contest. The contest is now open for submissions and runs from midnight Jan 7th, 2004 through the end of 29th Feb 2004 (all times in UTC!). Later on in January it will be possible to submit entries using a web form."

The Ultimate Obfuscation

[Anonymous Coward]

- Take C code
- Translate it into APL
- Print out code
- Drink coffee and beer quite sloppily while reading code
- Put code in file cabinet in basement behind locked door that has a sign on it "Beware of Leopard".

Re:The Ultimate Obfuscation

[Carnildo]

I don't know about that. Compared to some of the stuff in the IOCCC, APL is pretty tame.

Re:The Ultimate Obfuscation

[aled]

You forgot first going in the isolation tank with the hallucinogen drugs until you get to right state of mind for IOCCC.

Another win for M$!

[simonecaldana]

Microsft is going to win hands down, they would simple have to submit some windows source code.

Re:Another win for M$!

[gazbo]

Are you allowed to say that under the NDA you obviously signed given that you've obviously actually seen Windows code and aren't just making "an hilarious" karma-whoring "joke"?

Re:Another win for M$!

[simonecaldana]

I'm sorry, I can't answer you. I signed an NDA which forbids me to.

Re:Another win for M$!

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe Linus Torvalds will win with his unbelievably obfuscated version of SCO's UnixWare?

(Yes, that's a lame joke too. It's so lame that I have to tell it's a joke not to be moderated down as flamebait. And you should know it's not flamebait when it's true. Alright, the last sentence there was flamebait. But not anymore now that I've admitted it was. Now it's a joke. Funny! Laugh! Now give me my precious karma points, you fucking retard moderators! So now I'm a troll. Maybe I should post this anonymously. Or maybe I just should buy some cigarettes. Being a non-smoker makes me weird. Let this message be a warning if you consider to quit smoking. It's not worth it. You'll be like me, and there's nothing as disgusting as a self-concious troll. Cigarettes, cigarettes ... I'm off!)

Assuming, of course...

[MarkusQ]

Later on in January it will be possible to submit entries using a web form.

Assuming, of course, that they don't have a lameness filter.

-- MarkusQ

UTC not obfuscated enough

[Lionel Hutts]

UTC is a pretty complicated system, but it's hardly obscure enough for this purpose. They should use plain UT (which is UTC without leap seconds).

Re:UTC not obfuscated enough

[jonadab]

> They should use plain UT (which is UTC without leap seconds).

That's hardly more obscure than just using UTC. They should use
microfortnights since the beginning of the reign of Cyrus the Great,
expressed in one's complement notation.

Not hard enough!

[Larry David]

Obfuscated C code is one thing, and they make some great stuff, like that miniature BASIC interpreter which won last year (or was it 2002?). But if you want a REAL challenge, perhaps we should invent a new competition..

The first International Readable Perl Code Contest. Your challenge.. write any application in Perl that's over 100 lines and that at least two other programmers can understand. We don't expect to have any winners for the next few years, but get coding.. and we'll see you soon!

Re:Not hard enough!

[aled]

You know that Larry Wall (creator of Perl) won at least twice at IOCCC? that explains somethings...

Re:Not hard enough!

[jonadab]

I [perlmonks.org] don't [perlmonks.org] know [perlmonks.org] where [perlmonks.org] Perl gets this totally undeserved [cpan.org] reputation [wikipedia.org] for obfuscation [perlmonks.org].

Re:Not hard enough!

[jonadab]

> The first International Readable Perl Code Contest

Readable Perl is easy. (Actually, I find even bad Perl code easier to read
than "good" C code.) No, if you want a challenge in readability, we should
have an International Readable PostScript Code Contest. That language is ugly.

Re:Not hard enough!

[jonadab]

> any application in Perl that's over 100 lines

You do realize, do you not, that 100 lines is a whole lot of Perl. I know, in
C that's barely enough to declare your data structures for a medium-sized
CGI script, but a Perl program tends to be shorter. (There *are* really
large apps written in Perl (Bugzilla comes to mind), but if they were written
in C they'd be 2-10 times larger, depending on what they do.)

For example, consider an application that connects to the slashdot web server,
retrieves the main pa

Re:Not hard enough!

[jonadab]

> In Perl, we write that in ten lines and play golf with it.

In fact...

use WWW::Mechanize; use DBI; $\=$/;
my $dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:mysql:database=slashdot;host=lo c alhost", 'dbuser', 'dbpasswd', {'RaiseError' => 1});
my $query = $dbh->prepare("SELECT * from headlines WHERE title=? and seen='yes'");
my $update = $dbh->prepare("INSERT INTO headlines SET seen='yes', title=?");
while (1) {
($m = WWW::Mechanize->new())->get("http://slashdot.org") ;
$m->form_number(1); $m->set_f

Re:Not hard enough!

[jonadab]

> Now see, you're not being equal here and thats the problem with most people
> who only program in perl, php, python, ... Do all that in perl w/o using
> CPAN and all from scratch -- which is the exact limitations you're placing
> on C.

No, frankly, if I placed that limitation on C (no includes), Hello World would
be more than ten lines, much less that program. No, you can use as many
standard, freely-available, off-the-shelf libraries as you want, provided
any fairly accomplished C programmer woul

Tried it

[dtfinch]

I've never placed though. Had an othello game and an encrypted program within a program (interpreter). In retrospect I probably should have chosen a different game because othello had been done before, and written a bigger program to run on the interpreter.

I recognize one of the 2000 winners though from the Robot Battle Mailing List, long before he was in the contest.