All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

The History of Perl Golf

oneiron on 2002-03-12T07:50:21

Dave Hoover (nick redsquirrel) and Jerome Quelin have done a fantastic job of running the recent TPR golf tournaments; see TPR01 for the most recent one.

Here are some statistics from the recent series of games:

fwp Santa........... 35 players on scoreboard
irc Christmas....... 11 players on scoreboard
fwp Get Even........ 51 players on scoreboard
TPR Base-36......... 82 players on scoreboard
TPR Secret Number...127 players on scoreboard

I'm amazed at the number of new golfers the TPR games are drawing!
All this recent golfing activity has led Stephen Turner and me to ponder: What is the history of Perl golf?

As far as I can tell, the term Perl Golf was coined by Greg Bacon here.

Here is an interesting post: Larry plays golf with himself in 1991.

If anyone has more information on the history of Perl golf, please let me know, as I am eager to write an article on it. In particular, I am interested to learn the first occurrence of an organised golf competition, similar to the TPR tournaments mentioned above.

The Perl Challenge

Whammo on 2002-03-12T08:27:45

Not that this counts, but Mike and I used to run a weekly Perl Challenge on an internal Perl newsgroup during the summer and fall of 2000. The Challenge was two competitions in one - given a small, trivial, everyday problem, compose the shortest (the Perl Golf aspect, although we hadn't heard of Perl Golf at the time) and the fastest (as measured by Benchmark.pm) solutions.