From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,d978d3056ed727b9 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: David Emery Subject: Re: Language Challenge 2000 - Update Date: 2000/02/03 Message-ID: <030220002018030099%emery@grebyn.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 581338393 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit References: <38991E72.293907A4@sdynamix.com> <38992ADB.AC8748A8@mail.utexas.edu> <87bbro$9281@news.cis.okstate.edu> <87cg3u$8a21@news.cis.okstate.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 X-Complaints-To: news@cais.net X-Trace: nnrp-corp.news.cais.net 949627190 95877 192.70.213.5 (4 Feb 2000 01:19:50 GMT) Organization: CAIS Internet Mime-Version: 1.0 User-Agent: YA-NewsWatcher/4.2.4 NNTP-Posting-Date: 4 Feb 2000 01:19:50 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 2000-02-04T01:19:50+00:00 List-Id: At an IEEE Ada conference back in the late '80s, they held a programming contest. What made this unique was that it had two parts. The first part was to implement the given set of requirements. The second part consisted of some "maintenance" to apply to the system, i.e. to implement a revised set of requirements. Thus the emphasis in this contest was on how flexible the software was and how rapidly it could adjust to new requirements. There were 3 teams, if I remember right. My team had the most interesting solution :-), but we couldn't get it to compile. The problem was compiler internal errors, rather than issues with our own code. (We were simulating OO inheritance using generics, and vendor V's compiler choked on one particularly complex generic.) It's too bad, as our design would have allowed us to make the changes very quickly. The problem, as I remember, was to produce a system for selling theatre tickets. You had to support multiple ticket agencies, so concurrency was an issue. THe initial theatre was a "classic box", but we anticipated alternate theatre shapes, including theatre-in-the- round. As I recall, one of the other 2 teams also hit some compiler problems. The winning team had probably the least elegant design, but they got their software to work, which the other teams didn't :-( Another idea that was discussed, but not adopted, was a contest whereby the teams swapped designs/software, so in phase 2 you had to modify someone else's software. The scoring for that approach was based on both correctness of the initial design, and also how well another team could learn your design. But the "game mechanics" of such a contest could be touchy. After all, you spend a lot of effort learning someone else's software to make it easier for them to win! dave