Multi-item response from the project coordinator (Score 2)

[From the Software Carpentry project coordinator]

Thank you all for your postings regarding the Software Carpentry project. To answer some of the points that have come up several times:

This is a design competition, rather than a programming competition. Good entries should be relatively language-neutral --- we believe that at the 5000-word level, the similarities between modern object-oriented languages (C++, Java, Python, etc.) are more important than their differences.

Designs based on existing tools are very welcome. If, for example, you think the only way to meet the criteria for the "build" category is to extend the syntax of standard Makefiles, then please submit that as a design. (However, for the reasons discussed in the FAQ, if your plan for an implementation is simply to provide a Python scripting interface to GNU Make, you'll have to convince the judges that there's no "pure Python" way to achieve the same ends.)

No, Software Carpentry is not a company looking for some publicity. The project is being funded by Los Alamos National Laboratory, who believ that computational scientists and engineers need easier-to-use software engineering tools, and administered by CodeSourcery, LLC, who believe that those tools would be of use to the whole Open Source community. The FAQ talks about LANL's reasons for funding the project, as does this article from Doctor Dobb's Journal.

Yes, one of the project's goals is to give up-and-coming software designers a chance to get some attention, just as architects and classical musicians do.

Yes, the competition is open to submissions from any country.

No, this is not part of some perfidious Pythonesque plot for world domination :-). We thought very seriously about using Perl for the implementations, but after teaching classes in both Perl and Python at Los Alamos National Laboratory, came to the conclusion that the latter had a gentler learning curve. (This is not meant as disparagement of Perl as a tool for full-time professional programmers, it is simply an empirical observation of computational scientists and engineers.) Neither Guido nor any other member of the Python development team had any part in setting up the project, choosing Python, or choosing the competition categories.