Announcing the winner of masak’s Raku Coding Contest 2010

Originally published on 26 March 2011 by Carl Mäsak.

I feel like one of those people standing by the podium holding the envelope with the winner of the award written down on a note.

This we already know:

• matthias didn’t send in a p4 solution, so can’t win according to the rules.
• Util sent in a p4 solution, but it’s incomplete enough to practically disqualify him. Better luck next time.
• That leaves us colomon, fox, and moritz still in the game.

I hope one day to meet fox, either AFK or on IRC. He fought really well, but along one dimension: brevity. I might not have stressed it enough, but what I was after was a balance of all the traits I listed. Not very much of one of them.

Which leaves us with colomon and moritz. They both did really well on some tasks, less well on others. Somewhat informally it could be said that moritz’ strength is in code cohesion/elegance, whereas colomon’s is program robustness/performance. (As a biologist, I’m tempted to describe it as a genotype/phenotype distinction.)

Using an unquestionable, intrinsically subjective, never-to-be-divulged scoring system, I added up all of the accumulated scorings for each contestant and task, weighing the different traits according to perceived importance. (Apart from the original announced traits, I also added “correctness” as an important metric, only giving points for efficiency if the algorithm was correct.) The result that fell out is indeed significant, and tells us that the winner is…

…issss….

drum roll

Moritz Lenz! Congratulations!

This concludes this year’s contest. Stand by, maybe, for a “lessons learned from p6cc2010” post. Or possible some totally different post.