Thursday 26 April 2007

Goals of the ICFP Programming Contest

One of the first things we discussed in the organization team of the ICFP Programming Contest 2007 was what we want to achieve with the contest. We never drew up an ordered list, but the general concensus was that being able to

Show off your favourite programming (language) tools and programming capabilities

is one of the most important goals of the contest. A second important aspect is that

The contest should be fun.

These goals largely coincided with the goals of the previous contests. And of course, they are reflected in the prizes.

Btw, something interesting happened today. I was visiting the systems people to arrange computers and screens for some of the new organization team members. The systems guy was telling me that apparently the power outage from a couple of days ago had been caused by a SPAM mail message of a couple of megabytes that was triggering a bug in our server. The message itself seemed to be strange: several hundreds of attachments, all of them in strange encodings not known to our software.

Out of curiosity, I asked to get the message, and I will have a closer look at it later (although the contest doesn't leave me a lot of spare time). Since I suppose this blog will be read by clever language people, I might come back to it here.

2 comments:

Unknown said...
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Unknown said...

I had tons of fun during the last year's contest; hopefully the upcoming one will be even better.