Jan Dubois posted about Microsoft's 3rd Annual Scripting Games, where you can win prizes for writing Perl programs to solve programming problems like "find a word that you can make out of a phone number," and "count the number of characters in a given text file."
I'd enter if there were interesting prizes, but all the prizes for Windows-only software packages. :-(
Jan said there would be some ActiveState stuff given away...
Anyone following this may get some amusement out of the write-up of the VBScript solution to Advanced problem 2 (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/funzone/games/solutions08/avbsol02.mspx). It seems that when "The Scripting Guys" came up with their book solutions, Perl got a different answer than VBScript or Microsoft PowerShell. Guess who was right?
I found this while figuring out how many lines of code it took to solve the problems. The 8 Advanced events completed so far require:
* 234 lines of Perl;
* 398 lines of VBScript;
* 577 lines of Microsoft PowerShell.
The guest commentators' code was used where available, since (at least for Perl) it appeared that the guest had more notion of how the language worked than The Script Guys. The PowerShell result is adjusted down by 60 lines, because the guest for problem 4 put in a fair amount of help text not called for in the problem statement.
Tom Wyant