While I was flying to Portugal, the ICFP '25 Programming Contest was ongoing. Despite my anxieties about exorbitant AWS bills and crippling server bugs, the contest went relatively smoothly. Jack Stodart helped out in parts where I was unavaiable. I did have to fix some minor bugs here and there, mostly in the first hour of the contest (although I also had to fix a tricky bug in the post-lightning round problems using the flaky WiFi at Lisbon airport), but the server ended up holding up very well, and the cost of the various AWS services I used (primarily DynamoDB and Lambda) was only a total of about $20 USD.
My task description, post-lightning round addendum and reflective afterword were all themed around Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, and I put a great effort into the typesetting of these three documents. It was nice that many contestants picked up on the theming, and appreciated the typesetting. For promotional graphics, I posted images of the Seven Trumpets from the medieval Cloister Apocalypse, an illustrated manuscript of the Book of Revelation. One contestant posted AI-produced remixes of these timeless masterpieces of medieval illumination, which had my finger hovering over the ban button, but I was able to separate my personal revulsion of LLMs from my role as competition organiser. Besides, it would have been hypocritical.
One other "contestant" seemed to be participating simply to flame the organisers. While they were eventually banned from the Discord (thanks Alperen!), it was a big downer right at the start of the competition. This one individual aside, it seems that the contestants broadly enjoyed the competition and had fun solving it.
While it was interesting reading the write-ups and seeing the various approaches to the problems, I came away from this contest with the distinct impression that the ICFP community and the ICFP contest community are, for the most part, non-overlapping. This, combined with the immense stress it puts on organisers, leads me to wonder if the ICFP contest might be better off being organised by its own community, rather than the ICFP one. I'm not sure what benefit the connection to ICFP or ACM has to the contest community, if any, and I'm fairly sure there are no benefits in the other direction. I no longer think severing the ICFP connection would be tantamount to discontinuing the contest, because the contest community surely seems to have enough critical mass to be self-sustaining. Perhaps I will raise this with the ICFP steering committee.