Friday, June 27, 2008

The Darwin Race of Languages - Part 2

So, the race is on :-) If within 24 hours more than 20 people think they will enter the race, there's no holding back.

There will be a little web site next week on http://www.darwinraceoflanguages.com/. I will need a bit of time to work things out and put them up there, but it's already work in progress.

There are a couple of things that you can help me with:


  1. Find C#, C++, Java or other programmers to enter the race. A race is not a race without different horses, is it? Spread the word amongst news groups, friends, colleagues, et cetera.

  2. Help me pick a tool or program to build. I'm currently thinking of offering three subjects to pick from. I have the following suggestions:


    • A GUI for a Firebird compression tool

    • A tool to convert code on the clipboard to html for using it in a blog posting

    • (we need more!)

  3. Bug your boss to supply us with prices to give away. If you're the boss: handover those goodies :-). A small gesture is fine: it's all about honor anyway.
  4. Go to http://www.dzone.com/links/the_darwin_race_of_languages.html and promote that up the ladder so more people in the developers community get a notice of this.

The plan so far

  • 1 July: launch of the web site for the race. There will be some explanation on the race, what the purpose is, how to enter, et cetera. It will be a democratic race: there will be a voting system to pick a winner.
  • 8 July: entry closes. The race begins. There will a short 2 week sprint in which you can spend as much time as you want to and can afford to. You don't necessarily need to enter a full working program; it's more about how the language and the tool helped or hindered you in your work - you will need to write something about that.
  • 22 July: the race closes and the results will be published. Extra points will be awarded to people that documented their experiences during work. The voting begins.
  • 29 July: the voting completes and the winner gets the price (whatever it will be...)

Plans of course can be changed, and the format of the race is much open for debate. So, please send in your remarks.


Bye,


Bart

6 comments:

DelphiFreak said...

Maybe we should not search to far for some apps.

Here I found one which would be interesting:

http://www.sph.sc.edu/comd/rorden/mricron/bounty/

I was able to compile the sources with D7 but not with FPC.

ajasja said...

What about a tool for monitoring temperatures and CPU load on remote computers?
(I know about WMI, but it rarely works correctly)

gabr42 said...

Item 3: price => prize

Yogi Yang said...

How about a multi clipboard utility which will allow one to store more than one single item on clipboard.

Giving a bit more thought I think an application which will load an EXE into its own memory space as a loadable resource and then executing it from there instead of executing the exe. (If this is not understandable please let me know and I try to explain this a bit more)

Carlos said...

Sorry, but what do you mean by Firebird "Compression" tool?

DelphiFreak said...

It's not actually a firebird compression tool.

It's a GUI for the existing firebird "gbak" backup command line application.

Since firebird does not release diskspace when you delete records, it is the only way to use gbak to export/create/import to make your database file become smaller again.