RosettaCode Contest Results

LassoSoft's CEO Sean Stephens announced the outcome of the RosettaCode contest on Dec 10, 2013. The contest  was based on adding examples written in Lasso 9 to the task list on http://rosettacode.org. This site allows for comparison of programming languages, and showcases the clean Lasso 9 syntax alongside both peer and niche programming languages.

The public contest winner is Jolle Carlestam, a Swedish based Certified Lasso Developer who contributed 79 lasso examples. 

"A recurring insight was the great variety of solutions different languages used and how many of them were very chatty… as in long winded and lots of code", reported Mr Carlestam.

"But how a language like Java can be so big on the market with all that code beats me. Lasso can learn, not only to produce shorter code but also some stuff that is just simpler and more efficient. Or can’t be done at all in Lasso. But, those are exceptions, the more frequent experience was how well Lasso coped with the competition.

As a whole doing all the command line centered tasks was fun because it was a learning experience for me. I was not aware of all the things that Lasso is capable of on the command line before I attempted to solve some of the tasks."

Mr Carlestam contributed to examples ranging from fun like "Guess the number" to things like "Terminal Control / Hiding the cursor"

Alongside the public contest, Stephens challenged the staff of LassoSoft and it's sister company Treefrog to compete in their own time to see this important contribution grow without impacting current work activities. Jono Guthrie won the internal challenge with an outstanding effort over the month.

Together, the contest results meant that 257 programming tasks on Rosettacode.org now have a Lasso version on display, and Lasso is currently 52= in ranking based on the number of tasks with examples.

The contest was "a resounding success", says Stephens, "stay tuned for more contests!"