When I was in high school -- and yes, we had computers back in the 70s, though we had to make them out of animal skins using stone knives -- one of the math teachers ran a programming contest. The rules were that the winning program would be the one that produced the correct output, and that had the smallest product of lines of code times run time. That is, if your program took, say 100 lines of code and ran for 5 seconds, your score was 500. If someone else wrote 90 lines of code and ran for 6 seconds, his score was 540. Low score wins, like golf.

It struck me as a brilliant scoring system, rewarding both conciseness and performance.

But the entry that technically met the winning criteria was disqualified. The problem was to print a list of all prime numbers less than 100. The disqualified entry went something like this (most of the students were using BASIC back then):

100 print "2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61," 110 print "67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 87, 89, 91, 97"

The student who wrote that entry pointed out that not only was it short and very efficient, but the algorithm should be obvious to anyone with even a minimal knowledge of programming, making the program highly maintainable.