The Proximate Cause

There is, of course, a specific event that got me to actually create this thing. That would be ICFP'07, or rather the 2007 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming. It was last week. And, every year since 1998, there's been a programming competition associate with it held back in July or so, with winners announced (and the contest organizers' experience reported on) at the conference.

I attended the conference, as I (as team Celestial Dire Badger) had won the Judges' Prize (for an uncommonly “creative” solution) in the contest, and — as even I didn't discover until last Tuesday when the announcements were made — also placed third out of, oh, 357 teams. As a team of one person, while for example the #1 team had four and the #2 twelve.

So, I don't know, maybe I'm famous now or something? I mean, I was declared to be an “extremely cool hacker” to the applause of a few hundred members of the functional programming community, which I guess isn't quite the same as being entirely unknown. Or at least someone might be wanting to read what I have to say about that thing. And besides, everyone else is doing it.

In that case: I already have a chronological writeup of the contest weekend itself, but I have a bit more perspective now that I know more about the making of the contest... but more on that later.


Useful background for random people wandering in: if the contest website doesn't have enough info lying around, then the beginning of the problem statement (PDF) should be helpful in determining what on earth I'm talking about.