I'm Running a Programming Contest

A programmer casually announced that this year’s big ICFP contest had already started an hour ago—and the community immediately latched onto the most relatable part: the last-minute energy. The contest itself is a three-day challenge built around a brand-new language called littleman, where tiny on-screen workers walk around and trigger commands by stepping on them. In plain English: it’s coding turned into a weird little puzzle board game, apparently designed so you can’t just let an artificial intelligence bot run wild for 72 hours and call it genius.

But the real entertainment was in the replies, where curiosity, confusion, and deadpan comedy started wrestling in public. One commenter popped in with the blunt mood-check: is this thing already over? Another zeroed in on the bigger question hanging over the whole event: did this actually manage to be resistant to large language models, the text-generating AIs now looming over every online contest? That’s the big tension here—can humans still make a challenge that doesn’t instantly become bot food?

Then came the joke of the thread: “Planner did not understand fat man or wall clock.” It reads like a robot had a meltdown in a hardware store, and naturally that gave the discussion its meme energy. Another commenter compared the whole setup to Orca, a beloved visual coding toy, which gave the project some artsy-cult credibility. So yes, the contest launched—but in the comments, the real competition was between skepticism, nostalgia, and absolute nonsense comedy.