Thanks for finding out this information, Adam--this is really a cool story!
This may appear in the next success story.
Betsy
At 07:10 PM 9/19/00 -0400, Adam Turoff wrote:
>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.
>
>
