ICFP Contest 2004 Date Set

Bbazzarrakk writes "It's still a little ways off yet, but a date for the 2004 ICFP Programming Contest has been set. If you're like me, you need a little warning to plan for it and avoid missing it. The contest will begin Friday, June 4th at noon. For more information, keep an eye on The Official Contest Site."

Re:it gotta say it

[manavendra]

hehehe... for a moment I thought it was some sort of server error - till I actually read the page :-)

Nice page !

[manavendra]

Clean and to the point :-p

What is it?

[TwistedSquare]

So... after the useful subject and the useful web page, can anyone explain what this is and why it is significant?

From ICFP Contest 2003

[df200]

From the website of last year's contest: [chalmers.se]

Rules of the Game Is your favorite programming language the best? Does it lead to better and faster programs? Does it make programs easy to write and modify? Are you and your friends the best programmers in the world? Then prove it! All programmers are invited to enter the contest, either individually or in teams. The contest offers direct, head-to-head comparison of language technology and programming skill. We have a range of prizes for the winners: cash awards, books, invitations to the conference for students, and, of course, unlimited bragging rights. The prizes will be awarded at ICFP 2003 in Uppsala this August.

ICFP

[Nighttime]

International Conference on Functional Programming, in case you were wondering.

Does the Functional Programming part of the name preclude using object-oriented languages I wonder?

Re:ICFP

[bmac]

Nope. Any prog lang is ok, but the executable must be able to run on their platform, which in the past was a variant of Linux, if I remember correctly.

I think they are simply putting the functional langs up against all comers. The winners of the last couple of contests have been ocaml, (once again) if I remember correctly.

Peace & Blessings,
bmac

Re:ICFP

[PylonHead]

No, as the anonymous poster points out, last year C++ won first and second place. OCaml did win in the lightning round (the contest lasts 3 days, the lightning round judges entries submitted on the first day).

Last year, for the first time, they let you run your code on your own hardware, and simply submit the results. The winner ran his simple C++ algorithm on a farm of dual processor machines, and managed to brute force his way into first place.

Re:ICFP

[mvw]

Last year, for the first time, they let you run your code on your own hardware, and simply submit the results. The winner ran his simple C++ algorithm on a farm of dual processor machines, and managed to brute force his way into first place.

The problem of last year's contest was implementing the simulation of a formula one racing car.

Then you had to determine a set of control commands (steer left, right, accelerate, break) to stear it through a racing track from start to finish, which depending on the

Re:ICFP

[Anonymous Coward]

Using the functional programming languages forbid destructive updates

Thats not true, only lazy functional languages do that. You can have global references just fine in OCaml.

summary of past contest results

[Anonymous Coward]

First places in the main category since the contest began:

1998: Cilk (parallel C)
1999: OCaml
2000: OCaml
2001: Haskell
2002: OCaml
2003: C++

All languages can participate, in fact very many do, but as you can see, a "dynamically-typed" (misnomer) language never took the first place in the main category. Common Lisp and Scheme never took any of the first 3 places.

Re:summary of past contest results

[mvw]

Erlang (not strongly typed) won the Lightning division once, if I remember right.

Look Again...

[Bbazzarrakk]

The page has been updated.

For ICFP Contest Tips...

[Bbazzarrakk]

I also suggest Seven Lessons from the ICFP Programming Contest [kuro5hin.org].