in reply to JCWren Programming Challenge - Win a Perlmonks T-Shirt!

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  • Comment on Re: JCWren Programming Challenge - Win a Perlmonks T-Shirt!

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All Challenge ideas are welcome
by footpad (Abbot) on Nov 30, 2000 at 23:30 UTC
    If you've got a more compelling or interesting idea; please feel free to post it.

    In light of some recent threads; it's nice to see someone respond proactively and with generosity.

    Personally, I plan to work on this as an exercise, just to see what I learn and to see how close I come to the selected entry.

    --f
      OK, I take you point. I'd be happy to submit a challenge and take the time to judge others, if required. However, being so new the the Monks, I needs to ask one question:

      What motivates you?

      Specifically in a competition context. footpad has mentioned that he would simply complete the competition in order to see what he could learn. A very noble cause, indeed. However, I rather suspect some of the Monks may have a more competitive streak.

      So, let me know what you want and I'll see what I can do.

      --

      Brother Marvell

        Motivation comes in many forms; here are three threads that reveal various aspects of the values and ideals motivating many of the monks. They cover different topics, but still provide interesting insights:

        Regardless of the above, remember, we're all here to learn Perl. Do we really need a reason?

        --f

        My motivation for taking part in this contest (or at least, having written something that vaguely fulfills the requirements although I won't be sending it in due to lack of time) is the plain fun. I know how to use the modules from CPAN (LWP and Date::Manip in my case), and I know how to download something programmatically from the web, so I left these parts out as trivial. This contest gave me a nice challenge to think about a good control flow for such a program, together with a closely defined boundary. Playing with regular expressions and somemwhat striving for elegance, this was more like a scribbling and/or sketching session to me than the attempt to deliver a painting (and I don't think my scribbling is worth finnishing up and sending it in).

        As I am too lazy to compete now (or afraid to show my inability), this contest has brought me some time of goal-oriented pondering much like other brain-teasers or searches for algorithms do as well - I find such things relaxing and entertaining.

        Another thing contributing to my lazyness was the factor that the contest will be/will have been decided by the ability to time a mail transfer to jcwren such that the mail arrives/is sent at 00:00h EST. On the other side, the obvious problem (as discussed above by AgentM) is the problem of ranking, and time of arrival is one good method to judge.

      I am gonna have a bash an after that who knows I may well follow the example and set a challenge of my very own.

      --

      Zigster

        Perhaps this could be part of the prize - setting the next challenge - surely no mean feat in itself if it's going to be interesting enough to entice others to have a go.

        Pete