On Tue, Sep 19, 2000 at 03:42:35PM -0700, Betsy Waliszewski wrote:
> The president of the company said that at
> a computer programming contest at some major university (MIT?) 4 or 5 years
> ago, one contestant used Perl and blew away the competition. Afterward,
> Perl was banned from the competition because the judges decided it was
> tantamount to cheating.
One of the guys in the office says this used to be posted on TPI's
www.perl.org. The institution was UCLA, and the year was 1997.
Here's a memory of that preserved at http://chicago.pm.org/perlstory.html :
From an article that used to be posted at www.perl.org:
Perl "Too Good"
This is a true story. Names have not been changed.
UCLA's Computer Science Undergraduate Association regularly
hosts its programming competition. Contestants are given
six complex problems and have three hours to write programs
to solve as many of the problems as possible. In 1997,
the rules stated that any programming language could be
used so long as you solved the problem, so then-undergraduate
Keith Chiem entered and used Perl.
Keith did not merely win, he conquered. He solved five
of the six problems in the three hours allotted. The
second-place two-person team solved only three problems.
They, needless to say, were not using Perl.
But if you're a UCLA undergraduate contemplating entering
the contest and using Perl, don't bother. After Keith's
conquest, Perl was banned from the contest.
You've got to admire a language that is banned because
it makes problems too easy to solve.
These days, Keith is a sysadmin at Yahoo! Inc., and is
wondering what to do with the copy of Visual C++ that was
his prize.
Z.
