I had lunch with several colleagues today and the subject of the BCS Programming Competition cropped up. Generally speaking there is a negative reaction to the competition since in its current form it rewards a hurried 'hack-led' approach to program development rather than a considered 'design-led' approach. This hacking approach is, of coures, the complete antithesis of what many in an academic department of compuetr science are attempting to instil in the students. To a great extent that's why the competition is promoted less than enthusiastically by some staff.

I am pretty agnostic about the whole event. I can see both sides of the argument but err on the side that it's to be treated as a bit of harmless fun and, a bit like the Brits Awards, not to be taken too seriously. OTOH, the BCS is the Society that represents professional software developers and so there is a conflict there in that they seem to be promoting poor engineering practice in their competition.

In actual fact the competition shares some of the characteristics of Extreme Programming (XP) [see Extreme Programming: A Gentle Introduction., for example] and as such could be promoted in that way.

This struck home on Saturday during the Scottish heat. The judges don't inspect/judge the actual code produced when assessing the success/failure of a submission. It's purely down to how well the program(s) transform input to output and the judges use 'secret' data input to assess the degree of conformity with the problem specification. I.e. the output has to be an exact match with that provided to the judges otherwise the attempt is deemed to be a failure. Naturally, this limits the type of problem that can be set. Given the restrictions in the types of problem I believe that a relatively inexperienced programming team could be coached in the techniques that would maximise their chances of winning the competition. I suspect, too, that these techniques are at odds with good programming practice. Perhaps I will be able to test my assertion if the Strathclyde team enter next year and the Unexpected Exception proves the rule ;-)

As I said earlier, the best way to treat this competition is as a bit of fun. That being said, the contestants do seem to to compete as seriously and as hard as they can and there's no doubt that there's kudos attached to winning a regional heat and progressing to the national final.

Open-Source Web Servers: Performance on a Carrier-Class...

Against all the odds - BBC SPORT | Winter Olympics 2002 | Alpine Skiing | Baxter grabs bronze for Britain

Alain Baxter has won Great Britain's first ever Olympic medal in alpine skiing.

The 28-year-old Scot, nicknamed The Highlander, came home third in the men's slalom at Salt Lake City.

Well done Alain. Scotland's ( ;-) ) medal tally is now 1 gold, 1 bronze.

That's another one in the eye for English commentators that have been making derogatory comments. See, for example, NEWS.scotsman.com - Salt Lake City 2002 - Unsporting comments curl the nation’s lip

It's been a busy couple of days. In a moment of weakness I'd agreed some time ago to be the local contact for the Scottish regional heat of the British Computer Society Programming Competition. Over the past five years, Edinburgh University hosted the event but this year Strathclyde University was the venue and department hosted the event and prepared the computer facilities for the teams and judges. So, yesterday, I ended up lugging PCs around labs so that each team would have the same specification of machine in separate rooms. I also had to install Visual C/C++ (spit!) on these machines as that was one of the two allowable environments for the competition. The other was Java 1.3.1 which, fortunately, is already installed on all of our machines.

This morning I had to get up early and drive through to Glasgow so that I was there in plenty of time to set up and welcome the contestants and judges. Naturally, the weather had turned wintry and quite heavy snow had fallen yesterday and overnight. Made the journey quite demanding in terms of concentration required.

To cut a long story short, I actually made good time and arrived an hour before registration began. Martine McFarlane was the other local organiser and she had arrived about 20 minutes later replete with sandwich lunches and 'ginger'.

The judges, Donald Bell, Matthew Leah, and Tony Printzis were next to arrive followed closely by the contestants. As befits convention, the team names were chosen carefully ;-):

• Apply Computing
• Byte IT
• Chewin' the Inode
• Heh
• Unexpected Exception

Tony is a veteran of the programming competition having won through to the finals in each of the last five years as a contestant and, in fact, his team - Glasgow Univerity's "Midnight Hackers" - won the competition last year. Like a poacher turned gamekeeper, Tony was 'promoted' to judge this year!

I'll link to the actual results page of all regional heats in due course, but in the Scottish heat the new Glasgow University team "Chewin' the Inode" (2 final year students plus 3 postgrad research students) narrowly beat the Cisco UK "Byte IT" team (4 professional software engineers). "Unexpected Exception" - five second-year Strathclyde students - at least scored a moral defeat as they managed to submit attempts for several of the problems and as a result could be counted as the third place contestants. I hope the Strathclyde students are up for it next year as they'll have learnt a lot from the experience today.

Good luck to the "Chewin' the Inode" team for the finals on March 23.

On a final note: I was absolutely amazed that none of the 21 contestants drank coffee!