Hello all, apologies in advance for this long post: I just drifted on
and on...
I am looking to join a Common-Lisp team to participate in the ICFP
functional programming contest this year at
http://www.icfpcontest.org/
I have been Lisping for close to 2 yrs, so I'd like to join team
around that level. Being the stereotypical Lisp bigot, I will not use
any other languages in the contest, although I have no objections if
others in the team choose to occasionally dabble in sinful
languages. Of course, in real life, I am more pragmatic and use other
languages, but within the boundaries of a contest, I like to indulge
in my fantasy, even if this might not be appropriate (as in the VM
implementation last year).
I like it that if I do end up in a team, this contest will be a cool
distributed coding exercise spanning multiple time zones. I still
don't know how much time I'll be able to put in, but I will need
sleep, and may want to go to work -- definitely not the hard-core
competitive type, although some pressure + clear target + guaranteed
closure (contest ends in days) works wonders.
Last year, I soloed the contest, but got bitten by a nasty bug that
wasted a lot of time (didn't catch it early enough). The scoreboard
here shows my low score...
http://www.boundvariable.org/scoreboard.shtml
I am the entry on line 270, team 'What-I-need-to-register?' (yes, I
shall abstain from naming the team this year).
You might have read about the tasks in the contest: participants
implemented a low-level virtual machine (14 op-codes only) that then
ran a shell-like interface to multiple independent problems. After
getting the VM to run (unstably), I did not end up doing much within
the contest proper. As such, I think joining a team would allow me to
explore more this year.
Software
I am comfortable with either sbcl or clisp using Slime. I am currently
running some very old sbcl, Ubuntu and Slime releases. I'm not sure if
I'll have the time to upgrade everything. I prefer darcs, but anything
should be fine for the scale of this contest. I don't have a server
for central (scm, wiki, ftp, whatever) coordination, nor am I too
fluent at using irc.
Preferred libraries and setup to be hashed out with the team (now is
too early). If you need another member in your team, I would be
interested to chat some more.