The ICFP contest is interesting. This year a bit less than 1/4 of the entries were even in FP languages, and none of the winners were FP.
What about the contest makes it FP? The idea is to provide a forum to show the value of FP, but how are any outcomes of the contest actually used for this? I think it would be useful if somehow good FP solutions were analyzed "post-game" to show if/how FP methods are useful in solving such problems.
This could then be a forum for helping students (and others) to appreciate FP methods more; else rename it to the IC*P contest. :-)
Are the results available anywhere in a more legible form?
> The ICFP contest is interesting. This year a bit less than 1/4 of the > entries were even in FP languages, and none of the winners were FP.
The Lightning round was won by a single person using OCaml.
The two worst entrants were probably OCaml and Haskell (judging by their names).
> What about the contest makes it FP? The idea is to provide a forum to > show the value of FP,
I think the idea is simply to have fun.
> but how are any outcomes of the contest actually > used for this?
I would like to be able to study the results. For example, what was the average score or rank by programming language? How did dynamic vs static languages fare? What if you divide each score by team size? How much code was required? Does code size correlate with lighting vs normal (i.e. can we measure productivity)? Do big teams win regardless of language? What were the distributions of team sizes for each language? How many Java programmers does it take to beat an OCaml programmer?
Restricting consideration to the winners only and/or grouping all FP languages together is just throwing away the data. However, according to the lecturer on that video, most of the information required to perform such analyses properly was never gathered and will never be available.
> I think it would be useful if somehow good FP solutions > were analyzed "post-game" to show if/how FP methods are useful in > solving such problems.
> This could then be a forum for helping students (and others) to > appreciate FP methods more; else rename it to the IC*P contest. :-)
I would like to see the results from all ICFP's presented in a more easily assimilated form. People obviously put a lot of work into this contest but the results barely see the light of day.
>The idea is to provide a forum to >show the value of FP, but how are any outcomes of the contest actually >used for this?
If you aim to show the value of FP, you can't prove your point if you aren't willing to risk being proven wrong. If you artificially distort the test to give FP an unfair advantage or to reject non-FP outright, obviously no-one is going to have any respect for the results.
The problem is that in a fair contest, there's more to winning than choice of programming language. And even the programming language choice may be more a matter of familiarity, tools, libraries etc than the style of the language. So much boils down to popularity.
On 30 set, 07:30, torb...@pc-003.diku.dk (Torben Ęgidius Mogensen) wrote:
> namekuseijin <namekusei...@gmail.com> writes: > > A somewhat related ongoing programming competition is the Euler > > Project. It comes with some cool statistics which should make > > functional programmers happy: > >http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=statistics
> This is indeed a fun set of puzzles. They remind me a bit of the old > Duke University Programming Contest, which had a set of similar > problems that you had to solve in a few hours.
> I find the ICFP problems much too time-consuming to attempt. I prefer > small problems and a very short time limit.
It's more math oriented, but much fun indeed. :)
Some of the more advanced problems seem to almost approach ICFP-kind of difficulty, like 208: http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems&id=208 to calculate all possible closed one-fifth circular paths a robot could pursue given 70 moves...
It's also wildly popular, with many people from all over the world registered ("Within the past day 1542 registered users have visited.") and an average of at least some 50 people online at any one time! Solving math/programming puzzles! It's incredible in that respect alone...
namekuseijin <namekusei...@gmail.com> writes: > On 30 set, 07:30, torb...@pc-003.diku.dk (Torben Ęgidius Mogensen) > wrote: >> namekuseijin <namekusei...@gmail.com> writes: >> > A somewhat related ongoing programming competition is the Euler >> > Project. It comes with some cool statistics which should make >> > functional programmers happy: >> >http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=statistics
>> This is indeed a fun set of puzzles. They remind me a bit of the old >> Duke University Programming Contest, which had a set of similar >> problems that you had to solve in a few hours.
> Some of the more advanced problems seem to almost approach ICFP-kind > of difficulty, like 208: > http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems&id=208 > to calculate all possible closed one-fifth circular paths a robot > could pursue given 70 moves...
> namekuseijin <namekusei...@gmail.com> writes: > > On 30 set, 07:30, torb...@pc-003.diku.dk (Torben Ęgidius Mogensen) > > wrote: > >> namekuseijin <namekusei...@gmail.com> writes: > >> > A somewhat related ongoing programming competition is the Euler > >> > Project. It comes with some cool statistics which should make > >> > functional programmers happy: > >> >http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=statistics
> >> This is indeed a fun set of puzzles. They remind me a bit of the old > >> Duke University Programming Contest, which had a set of similar > >> problems that you had to solve in a few hours.
> > Some of the more advanced problems seem to almost approach ICFP-kind > > of difficulty, like 208: > >http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems&id=208 > > to calculate all possible closed one-fifth circular paths a robot > > could pursue given 70 moves...
