Author: Anthony Cozzie
Date: 12:33:42 02/23/05
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On February 23, 2005 at 15:21:30, Scott Gasch wrote: >I hate to ramble about this topic but we are not doing gymnastics at the >olympics where we need judges. There are pretty clear emperical ways to define >a good program: it should do the job, be fast and be small. Readability, >clarity, reusability, approach... these things are nice when you are writing >code at work or hacking on your chess engine. But the question here was "solve >this problem" not "solve this problem using method x (and by the way make nice >readable, reusable code)". > >If you agree about the goals of a good program then how to measure is simple: > >1. We can verify that it does the job easily enough -- compile it and run it >2. We can emperically measure size by compiling all entrants with the same >compiler and settings and comparing the amount of code generated. Counting >lines of C or characters in a file is ridiculous. >3. Because small is not always fast, the last phase is to time the execution of >each entrant. > >The balance between 2. and 3. is debatable but I don't know why we talk about >reusable code or debate people's algorithm choice. (of course this assumes >people are coding in the same language... I don't know how to pick in a pool of >submissions where some people used C and others used Perl... other than to say I >_truly_ appreciate a clever Perl script (and could not, personally, think of one >to solve the problem) but Perl loses on metrics 2. and 3.) > >Scott I pretty much already gave my prize to Alessandro :) anthony
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