Hi Kas and Andrew
You both bring up some very interesting points.
quoting Kas:
"I talked about this because of Marcel's competitions which have rules about
loading files (so everything has to be written on the spot, (which I like as
a perspective) but those rules don't take into account that different
systems consider different things to be a part of the language itself nor
for open-source systems being changeable themselves, making the whole rule
moot, in a way."
and quoting Andrew:
"Yes, exactly, but it is important not to let the process become more
important than the result. Don't think I'm arguing for perfect performances
here, I certainly don't mean to suggest that, but if you are going to have a
programming competition then make it about programming. "
In the competitions that I organize I try to divert attention away from
these aspects. My primary focus is to bring live coding to a lay-audience.
The competitive element is there to create excitement, and the rules that
I've formulated are not intended to highlight programming skills but
thinking skills. I want an audience who understands nothing at all about
coding to at least understand that what is being projected is a
manifestation of a thought process. The idea is that the performer who
demonstrates superior thinking would "win". The audience votes for the
winner based on applause. And I would prefer that the audience voted on the
basis of what they experienced as a performance rather than asking them to
base their choice on something they don't understand (C, SC, CK or
whatever). A competition which would be about programming would require an
expert jury to decide the winner, and I am targeting a decidedly non-expert
audience as the jury.
I would like very much if we could go into the discussion further, but I
think it would be useful if the interested parties would read my article and
respond to what's written there:
http://kmt.hku.nl/~marcel/LiveCodingArticleDRAFT/<
http://kmt.hku.nl/%7Emarcel/LiveCodingArticleDRAFT/><
http://kmt.hku.nl/%7Emarcel/LiveCodingArticleDRAFT/>
(because it's still a draft I wasn't planning to make it broadly public yet,
but what the heck...)
looking forward to debate...
Marcel
Received on Fri Feb 22 2008 - 15:33:35 GMT