Lambda the Ultimate

A few years back (back around the year 86 or 87 to those who really care) when I worked at Digital Equipment Corporation, I caused a bit of a stir by entering a new "Note" in the Languages notesfile (which was one of many VAXNotes notesfiles paving the corporate intranet of DEC back in the days before the internet really existed to any meaningful extent).

The note was entitled "Battle of the Languages" and the idea was that people would have the opportunity to prove the superiority of their particular favorite language by posting the source code for the now somewhat famous computer simulation called "Life" which was invented by the Cambridge mathematician John Conway, and which consisted of the following rules:

For a space that is 'populated':
Each cell with one or no neighbors dies, as if by loneliness.
Each cell with four or more neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.
Each cell with two or three neighbors survives.
For a space that is 'empty' or 'unpopulated'
Each cell with three neighbors becomes populated.

In an matter of days, there were upwards of twenty different languages represented as replies to the intitial posting (note). I think the language "C" was the first to post a solution followed by Pascal (my current language of choice), as well as many others (sans Java and a few other more recent languages for obvious reasons).

I think I may still even have a backup tape of this and other notesfiles which was made on a VAXstation 2000 back around 1990 or so if anyone is interested, but I digress...

My main point in posting this is to state that I always enjoyed conducting that little experiment and I am not real sure what was really proven (other than the fact that people can certainly be passionate about their favorite computer programming languages).

I am half tempted to conduct the same experiment today, although I imagine that, due to the wonders of Google and other search engines, that the source code listings of some of the more popular languages would appear within minutes rather than hours or days. This would especially be true for a common mathematical simulation like Life, which has already been posted to death many times over.

It might be interesting to see what were to happen if the same contest were conducted using a different simulation candidate however... any takers on what to use for such an experiment and what parameters to set as rules (graphics or text output only, etc.)?

Thanks

-dav0 (aka David McLure - DEC employee from 1984 to 1992)