I like the idea, and we have done this sort of thing at our local Perl Monger's meetings. We didn't use the rules of golf, though, we used the 'Perl Death Match' format.

A judge presents a programming challenge with a twenty minute time limit. Two teams or two individuals compete. Team coding turns out to be much more fun. The audience is able to see both team's progress; video projectors show each team display.

We typically compete for coding speed, functionality, and style. Winners are usually easy to recognize.

A few challenges that I remember were to write programs that:

• Download historical stock quotes from Yahoo and graph them.
• Print the first 1000 primes.
• Tell whether or not a string is a valid ISBN number.

There are a few strong programmers that often dominate the matches. The surprise is that many programmers with great strength in some areas have glaring weaknesses in others.

I think it would be good to add another type of contest to the Perl Golf events that happen here.

It should work perfectly the first time! - toma