Peter Seibel (the man behind Practical Common Lisp) is launching a new publication, Code Quarterly, which looks intriguing to me. He’s hoping to run a coding challenge in each issue, and I know this is the sort of fun dear to many a coder’s heart. The first coding challenge has been up for a couple of weeks, and it involves implementing a parser for Markup, a lightweight markup language similar to Markdown and reStructuredText.

Peter writes:

In fact the idea for this code challenge came to me when I was implementing this code myself (in Common Lisp) and I started thinking about how I’d like to try writing it in Haskell and then I thought what I’d really like is to see how someone who knows what they’re doing would write it in Haskell.

If coding competitions are your thing, toss your hat into the ring and enjoy! I’m looking forward to seeing how Code Quarterly shapes up. I suspect there’s plenty of appetite out there for hacking-related articles of a length and depth somewhere between a blog posting and a book chapter. Best of luck to Peter with what I think is a fine idea.