On Saturday 04 November 2006 20:43, Dave Smith wrote: > Just wanted to share my impressions about the Mozy coding contest. I > found that the majority of the questions had to do with the ability to > parse text and manipulate strings. Only one question had to do with > anything else, and it was thrown out. I can only conclude that BDS > thinks people who can write programs to parse text in 10 minutes or less > are worth a $10,000 award. I personally think the breadth of the > questions was lacking. Maybe phase 2 had a wider breadth of problems -- > I didn't advance, so I don't know. > > I personally felt limited as my strongest language (C++) lacks good text > processing in its standard library. Since I was not allowed to use my > favorite libraries (Qt has an awesome string class that would have made > the problems *much* easier), I was unable to complete several of the > problems in the alotted time.I did complete one of the problems in 2 > minutes using Perl, while most of the others left me gasping for air > after 10 minutes of C/C++. Oh well. :) > > Curious how others did, and also wondering if the $10k was awarded today. >
I felt similarly. I managed to finish all but one--which I was less than 30 seconds from finishing. I did it all in PHP--as that is what I currently use most. I am proficient with C and C++, but as I haven't used them in my day-to-day for a long time I am a bit rusty. A timed contest isn't the best time to brush up. PHP is also not the best at text processing, at least I do very little text processing in a normal day. I found the preg functions highly useful, and throughout the entire round I kept thinking that some perl monger is gonna clean up. I didn't advance to the second round, but it was still fun. If anyone is interested I can post my solutions to the six round one problems. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
