Tango and the Hackontest

[Lars Ivar Igesund]

Bill Baxter Wrote:

> Lars Ivar Igesund wrote:
> > I have registered Tango for the Hackontest [1], a Google sponsored
> > competition for open source projects. Unlike Google Summer of Code, this
> > project seems to have its participants decided by an independent jury, and
> > so we probably have a bigger chance at being accepted. Maybe enough
> > community activty (suggest features for implementation, voting, ...) will
> > do it. In any case, this can be a great show case for D, and I recommend
> > all to take a look, register and make a vote.
> > 
> > http://www.hackontest.org/index.php?action=Root-projectDetail%2835%29
> > 
> > Contest prizes will go to those doing the actual coding.
> 
> Hmm, I think despite the jury it's still going to be tough for Tango to 
> get in on this one:
> """
> the Hackontest jury will look at the submitted projects and developers 
> and choose the three participating developer teams - three persons each 
> - *according the highest promoted features* and the most promising 
> hacker profiles.
> """"
> 
> So a big part of the selection is going to be about how many people vote 
> for particular features and projects.
> 
> I think that puts the odds highly in favor of well-known end-user apps 
> (like Blender and OpenOffice) rather than library projects written in 
> niche programming languages.  They also say PR for open source is a big 
> reason for doing it.  So they're going to want to have competitors 
> working on projects which can be easily explained to the public (like 
> Blender and OpenOffice).
> 
> And ultimately only *three* projects will be selected.  So I think 
> chances were probably a lot better for summer of code than they will be 
> for this.
> 
> Still, I think it's great you registered.  It puts D and Tangos names 
> out there in front of a lot of eyeballs.  And it will be even better if 
> a significant number of people comment and show interest.
> 
> --bb

I agree that the chances are slim (I initially thought there would be more than 3 teams), but I also think that as long as Tango is listed high (needs some activity for our proposed requests), we will get some nice publicity. I also think that even high profile open source projects, often have fairly few active (as in programmers) contributors, and that Tango in number of contributors can match many of them. The exception is the typical meta projects like KDE which have very many contributors because they have so many subprojects.

And to expand a bit on what is needed - feature requests are not enough, people need to register themselves as implementors - and as it is said, interesting profiles is part of what weighs in in the selection process. The selected teams will get a free 3 day trip to Zurich in Switzerland, in late September this year.

What I am hoping, is that the promise of D somehow can be tested / proven through such a contest - would a D team be more productive than one using C++ as the main language? I know that language probably isn't a focus, but maybe the jury could be made to wonder through comments, project description (my job), etc.

Lars Ivar