Programmers are suckers for a meme

Many Open Source projects have and IRC # for developers. The NetSurf project is no different. During a discussion someone jokingly suggested that one contributor should be asked to take the FizzBuzz test. Can you guess what happened next?

Ten minutes later Michael Drake posted this solid example in C which is where it all ought to have ended.

Being programmers, of course this had a predictable result. The original question, the reason for asking it and any the serious point being made in the original article were discarded. Just so everyone (including myself) could play silly buggers over our lunch break. Coders, it would seem, simply like to produce a solution even if it is only for fun.

None of these programs took more than ten minutes (except the JAVA monstrosity), are reproduced with permission and I am to blame for none of them (ok maybe just the one ;-).

First up was Rob Kendrick with the classic solution in C (his day job is as a support team lead which seems to make those programmers who cannot do this seem even more scary bad.)

Next was Daniel Silverstone who turned this Lua solution out very quickly and berated the rest of us for not following the rules ;-)

The final C solution was my own uber silly sieve implementation

Peter Howkins decided the world required a solution in PHP

When pointed out that his solution stopped at 50 he presented this vastly superior and obviously idiomatic solution

Finally after a long time James Shaw caused mental anguish and wailing with this abomination unto Nuggin.

With Luck everyone has now got it out of their system and we will never have to put up with this again (yeah right). And now you also know why Open Source projects sometimes take ages to release ;-)