[Gardeners] Lisp contest

[Peter Seibel]

On Apr 22, 2006, at 12:29 PM, Pablo Barenbaum wrote:

> I had the idea that some kind of "Lisp contest" could be
> good for getting the community together.
>
> The rest is left as an exercise to the interested reader. ;-)

So I was thinking along similar lines recently, though not of a  
contest specifically. My thought was that we should have a CL  
Gardeners' Plant a Flower Day. The idea would be that we'd pick a  
specific day, probably on a weekend, and anyone who wants to  
participate would write, on that day, a small Lisp program that does  
something neat. These programs would be like flowers--not big  
gardening projects designed to Save Lisp, but small ornaments for the  
Lisp garden.

I'm just making this up as I go along but here are some possible rules:

   - You can use any libraries you want but they must be included in  
your submission.

   - You must specify what Lisp implementations and OS's your program  
is known to run on.

Entries should be submitted as either tar.gz or .zip files that  
unpack into a single directory whose name is your name. In that  
directory, at the top level you should provide a single file,  
load.lisp, that can be loaded from the CL-USER package via LOAD to  
load/compile your program and any libraries. If you use ASDF  
(recommended) to load your code and its libraries, you can use this  
file to set up the ASDF:*CENTRAL-REGISTRY* before invoking  
ASDF:OPERATE. Also in the top-level directory should be a plain text  
file named README or README.txt that explains any other details  
needed to run the program (e.g. if the program needs to be configured  
in any way, this is where you'd explain how to do it.)

If folks are interested, I'll pick a date and set up something on the  
lispniks.com web site for submitting and reviewing entries. If we  
want to make it a contest, I'd say we should have it be a popularity  
contest, in the good sense. That is, after the entry day, we'll have  
a couple weeks where all subscribers to the Gardeners' list can vote  
for their favorite flowers. Prizes will be virtual--the recognition  
of one's peers and a notice on lispniks.com of the winners. The point  
is to give everybody a good excuse to do a bit of Lisp hacking and to  
share gardening tips.

-Peter

P.S. I realize there's nothing to stop folks from working for more  
than one day on their program and I won't even say that that's  
against the rules. But the spirit of the thing is that these flowers  
should be small hacks, not major projects. Keep in mind that your  
fellow gardeners are not going to vote for your flower if they have  
to slog through 40,000 lines of code.

-- 
Peter Seibel           * peter at gigamonkeys.com
Gigamonkeys Consulting * http://www.gigamonkeys.com/
Practical Common Lisp  * http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/