Quote Originally Posted by Schmidt View Post
I've already put some thoughts (as well as quite some work) into that in my post #730:
http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.p...=1#post4917477

This is, as I think a nice mix of DB-related (search)stuff, networking-stuff, threading-stuff -
text-parsing is involved - and a little GUI-challenge is in there as well, all of them things
we use in our daily work as (mainly) LOB-developers.

It's still doable in a managable (teams allowed) amount of time I think - and a few additional
challenges could be added as well (with regards to engineering, which almost always touches
the realm of easy extensibility...

E.g. one could require in addition, that the App should be already designed in a way, to allow
easy movement of the Server-part to a WebServer - and the GUI-Part into a Browser (as a
kind of "customer-change-request").

Would like to see solutions in other languages as well (e.g. a Javascript, or Python-solution) -
not only .NET or VB6 as the contenders - a Forum for that is already there - and when it's
indeed well-engineered solutions which come out in the end - we could make that even a
sticky-thread in the contest-forum, kept alive to allow other interested devs to provide
better designed or optimized solutions over time - and stick them in there.


Olaf
Sorry I missed that post. I headed into the woods on that day and just got back. Considering the impressive amount of writing from then until now, I decided not to read all the posts that I missed.

The suggestion is a really good one for a coding contest. It isn't terribly difficult, nor is it trivial, and it does manage to avoid being about math tricks. Unfortunately, I also think it's liable to be DOA just like (most of) the other coding contest suggestions. I'd like to see it come about...but I barely have enough time to waste posting on VBF already, and I would expect that others feel the same way.

However, the more I think about it, the more I think that your idea has merit beyond just voluntary work on a forum coding contest. It isn't my field to be studying coding efficiency, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that some company like MS, Google, or some such, might be interested in funding a true study of coding efficiency in various languages, and that problem seems like one that could be done. The one change I would suggest would be that the document being searched might be something that was large and a total snoozer, such as the Congressional Record, rather than a more controversial text like the bible. After all, with the Congressional Record: Nobody would already know what was in there and nobody would know what was NOT in there.