On Sun, 28 Feb 2010 12:05:12 +0100, Stefan Behnel wrote: > Steven D'Aprano, 28.02.2010 09:48: >> There ought to be some kind of competition for the least efficient >> solution to programming problems > > That wouldn't be very interesting. You could just write a code generator > that spits out tons of garbage code including a line that solves the > problem, and then let it execute the code afterwards. That beast would > always win.
Obfuscated code competitions could do the same: insert your simple, straight-forward, completely unobfuscated algorithm somewhere in the middle of 15 GB of garbage code. Who would even find it? But they don't, because human judges decide the winner, not some silly rule of "the most lines of code wins". In any case, I wasn't serious. It would be a bit of fun, if you like that sort of thing, and you might even learn a few things (I never knew that ints don't have an __eq__ method), but I can't see it taking off. I prefer to use my powers for inefficiency to be sarcastic to strangers on Usenet. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list