Selecting The Seven Languages In Seven Weeks Winners

About a week or so ago, I finished working my way through Seven Languages in Seven Weeks by Bruce Tate. To celebrate my mostly triumphant reading of the book (shakes fist at Haskell, Day 3), I wanted to give away a few copies. But, in order to select the winners of the book, I wanted to have a little fun and try to play with the Mapping concepts that were often discussed within the book.

Given an array of players (those that submitted sample code on my wrap-up), I created an ArrayMap() function and a function that would randomly return a given value. The idea was to continue to reduce the collection of players until only 2 were left.

Since the reduction mapping might result in an array of length less than 2, I had to continually loop until the final array contained exactly two elements. When I ran the above code, I got the following page output:

Starting Length: 27
Current Length: 18
Current Length: 15
Current Length: 13
Current Length: 11
Current Length: 11
Current Length: 5
Current Length: 3
Current Length: 3
Current Length: 1
Starting Length: 27
Current Length: 21
Current Length: 16
Current Length: 10
Current Length: 8
Current Length: 8
Current Length: 7
Current Length: 7
Current Length: 7
Current Length: 5
Current Length: 1
Starting Length: 27
Current Length: 22
Current Length: 21
Current Length: 13
Current Length: 10
Current Length: 6
Current Length: 6
Current Length: 5
Current Length: 5
Current Length: 3
Current Length: 3
Current Length: 2
-------------------------------------------------
Winner: Jared Cacurak
Winner: Matt Gutting

As you can see, the reduction mapping had to run 3 times before it ended up with an array of length 2. Of course, I know there are much more efficient ways of doing this; but, efficiency wasn't really the point - I just wanted to have some fun with it.

Congratulations to Jared and Matt! You're about to get seven languages deep!