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Comment by bvdbijl | Hacker News Reader

Yeah sure.

It's just that for performance reasons some languages really are better than others.

Agreed. If performance is the main (or an important) criteria for the competition then the choice of language is rather more significant.

It's why IOI (http://www.ioi2012.org/competition/rules/) doesn't allow interpreted languages, because they are (or at least when the competition was first held were) just too slow.

If you have only 1-5 seconds of computations time you're going to choose for a compiled language every time

I thought rules were there to discourage unfair advantage, not disadvantage? Why would you need a rule for that?

In any case, I see both python and ruby on the page you linked to, so perhaps I'm missing something.

Well it's just that to support another language they need to make solutions for every problem in that language to test that it's actually possible and they don't want to do that.

and on that page it says:

    Each submitted source program must be written in C, C++ or Pascal, it must be smaller than 100 KB, the evaluation server must be able to compile it in less than 10 seconds and at most 256 MB of memory. No other extensions different than the ones listed above will be run.

They put Python and Ruby on the machines so you can write a script to generate testcases, you can't submit programs written in those languages

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