Wehn I started using Twitter a couple of weeks ago, I was intrigued with the 140 characters limit imposed by Twitter for each post (aka a tweet ) on Twitter. Of course, there was a lot of creative usage of the limited space for status updates by users of Twitter. But I wondered if anybody had ever tried to write a complete program in the 140 character limit imposed by Twitter? A quick google search found only a few references to short programs, one of which was a complete wiki in 222 characters of Perl listed as part of a competition for the shortest wikis :
So I posted this as a question on Twitter :
“Can anyone code a complete Web app in 140 Chars? Well close enuf:See this Wiki written in 4 lines/222 chars of Perl! http://budurl.com/eyn6 ”
A fellow Twitter User – Marek Foss picked this up and retweeted it as a challenge here :
There was not much of a reaction so we sort of forgot about it for a while. Yesterday however, Marek and I exchanged a couple of messages and decided to revive it. Marek posted it as a challenge at his blog :
He also managed to create a 140 character application in Perl that keeps a log of messages posted by any user – sort of like Twitter. You can see it live here
and download the source code here.
Pretty neat !
He also emailed Mashable and they picked up on this interesting story and posted this entry on their blog:
There have subsequently been a few submissions from talented programmers all over the world. So keep them coming and the best application will be picked within 2 weeks.
Incidentally, one of the inspirations for my original post was also the fact that many years ago in my graduate Comp Sci classes, I had learnt and mastered the programming language APL (stands for A Programming Language). It is arguably one of the most arcane and cryptic progamming language ever invented – it uses every last ASCII symbol as a shorthand for some very powerful Arrray operations, and if I remember we even had a special APL keyboard. Here are a few sample APL program (from Wikipedia):
?6?40
And here is another one :
(?R?R°.×R)/R?1??R
The first one is a Pick 6 (from 1–40) lottery random number generator, complete with
guaranteeing no repeated numbers, and sorting the results in ascending order. (in just 5 characters !)
And the second one finds all prime numbers from 1 to R (in just 17 characters !)
Anyway, I actually wrote a complete program to play Backgammon (of all games) in APL (of all languages) !
While I can no longer code in APL there is a small but active community of APL users out there. Maybe this contest will bring them out into the open ?