SEC: UNCLASSIFIED:-[mercury-users] ICFP results

[Ralph Becket]

Ian.Sykes at defence.gov.au, Monday, 14 October 2002:
> 
> For the un-initiated among us, what is ICFP and what is the significance of
> this result?

The ICFP is the International Conference on Functional Programming and
is one of the top declarative programming fora.

For the past four or five years, the ICFP has run a programming contest.
The contest runs for 76 hours from the time the problem specification is
posted, after which point the competing teams should each have submitted
a working program.

Since nobody could agree on just how much impurity was acceptable in a
declarative language, solutions in any language are acceptable.

The contest problems are complex - to date the problems have included
writing a player for a board game, a program optimizer for AI characters
in adventure games, a ray tracer, a compression program for an HTML-like
language, and this year a program to control a robot in a competitive
environment.

The contests are essentially fun and the prizes are bragging rights and
some small amount of cash.  It is interesting to observe the relative
number of entries using declarative and imperative languages (usually
about 50/50, although the last two years have seen a considerable skew
in favour of imperative languages as the contest's reputation has
spread) vs the performance of those entries (the imperative languages
typically suffer very badly when it comes to passing correctness tests;
those that do pass usually fair poorly in comparison with their
functional competitors on performance grounds.)

I'm not going to start a religious war on what can be concluded from the
results.  Except to say that the imperative languages suck :-)

- Ralph
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