With slightly less gratuitous buildup of expectations this year, but with no less grandeur and excitement, we're proud to announce:

The 2011 Perl 6 Coding Contest

Today there's two of us arranging the contest: the esteemed Moritz Lenz, and me. Hello.

This is a contest for people who are aware that Perl 6 has been "officially released", and who want the perfect excuse to start playing around with the language. As the Perl 6 community steadily works its way towards production-readiness, we can already enjoy ourselves royally by solving interesting Computer Science problems!

Here's the deal:

do five tasks, and you might win Amazon books worth €100!

Addendum: Thanks to an anonymous donor, we're very happy to announce that there is now a second prize too: Amazon books worth 100 USD!

The contest starts now, today on 2011-12-25. It ends five weeks later, on 2012-01-29. Registration is open for two weeks, starting now. Just send an email to cmasak@gmail.com — saying "sign me up!" or even sending your Amazon wishlist so we'll know which books to buy you if you win.

You might be curious about what you need to do to win. Here's an extract from the file RULES :

Since "code quality" is a slightly subjective measure, let us provide a few hints of what we'll be looking for: * Correctness. * Readability. * Consistency. * Clarity of intent. * Algorithmic efficiency. * Idiomatic use of Perl 6. * Brevity. In short, what we're looking for is top-quality code. That's how you win.

Here are the five tasks. Write Perl 6 programs to...

Find a way to express an integer as an expression containing four 9s. (more)

List the numbers which are sums of cubes in more ways than one. (more)

Calculate addition chains. (more)

Slide a hex-shaped piece across a board. (more)

List all possible trees of a certain type. (more)

We've chosen the problems so that they're easy to explain, but allow contestants quite a bit of freedom to play around with various solutions.

If you're curious about the details of the contest, I recommend the file RULES . For easy downloading, here's a .zip file of everything you need for the contest.

Addendum: For useful afterthoughts, we've decided to keep a file NOTES around. Think of it as useful clarifications to the existing files in the repo. We won't pass or fail people based on things found in NOTES , but the items may help you with the tasks.

The rest is up to you. Hope hear from you — we want you to win those books!