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Python team for ICFP contest?

Warren Postma embed at NOSPAM.geocities.com
Fri Aug 25 14:14:42 EDT 2000 
I was interested that they chose a problem in "parsing and optimization" for
1999.  Do you think a more mundane "line of business" or "web applet" type
problem might ever pop up in their sites? .... Or is ICFP solely interested
in realms of programming that are interesting to the functional-programming
academia.  I find FP advocates favour computational and algorithmic
complexity over operational or interoperational complexity.

In other words, generally useful tools for line-of-business oriented, or
web-site oriented,  develoment problems are not so easily judgeable as
optimizers, but good tools for these types of problems are perhaps a more
crying need than an opimization suite for a state-machine-language.

For example, the winning 1999 team states that "strong static typing" was
very useful to them, as it should be in their problem domain.  I find that
many more general-purpose domains, such as manipulation of HTML or XML data,
is more easily accomplished in very loosely typed languages such as Python,
and is more readable when coded in a procedural style, rather than in a
functional style.

Could not a similar contest be created for Python?   Start from scratch, and
in C and Python, for example build a web-content delivery system, with a
certian specification, over a weekend.    The specs would have to be
significantly different from what is allready possibly in any existing
Python, Perl, PHP or VBScript/ASP solutions, to see how fast you can adapt
the Python system.  Perhaps an "online community web site"
a-la-Zope+Squishdot could be created, and judged subjectively by a panel.
Reuse and adaptation of existing code could be encouraged, to foster a more
real-world like solution.

Warren
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