[szc]

Speaking as a judge of the 27th competition, formatting doesn't give an entry as much of an advantage as you might think - what it does beyond the formatting has more influence. Code "quality" is always evaluated after pre-processing and restructuring. Credit is definitely given for compactness, functionality, uniqueness and the handling (exploitation) of boundary conditions.

Quite often there is something that "has not been seen before" - those entries do have a greater chance of being picked. The Ig-Nobels are seen as anti-Nobels. It is somewhat ironic that one of the few programming accolades you can be awarded is for writing code that will win an IOCCC award.

Of python: I am quite biased against the language - there are limited ways to speak or communicate it to a blind or deaf person. Python relies on the physical layout and structure to be semantically correct. (Python correctness does not survive whitespace or silence removal - which requires both working eyes and ears)

[jedimastert]

I've worked with people who are visually impaired many times, and even programmers who are visually impaired more than once, and yet I keep getting floored with things I had never considered as a sighted person, like the fact that silences are not equivalent in Python...

[Santosh83]

Can you explain more about what you mean by silence removal and Python code's fragility? What does sound have to do with source code?

[KineticLensman]

> What does sound have to do with source code?

If you are visually impaired you may have to use a screen reader. If that screen reader cannot correctly 'say' the whitespace, it may be difficult to understand languages such as Python where indentation is significant.

[ivanbakel]

How would a blind person code? They need a way to convert text on-screen to sound (or haptic feedback). Such a program can be easily used for C, because all the structure of C code is explicitly marked by its syntax - opening and closing braces, semicolons, macro beginnings and endings, etc. A C code reader can skip over any amount of whitespace, because none of it is semantic.

A Python screen reader would not have the same power. It would somehow have to communicate the significant whitespace to the user through sound. You cannot "remove the silence" when listening to a Python program, in the same way that you cannot strip out whitespace without changing the behaviour of the program.

[ufo]

In theory it should be possible to read out loud an "indent" and a "dedent" token whenever the indentation changes. That would be basically the same trick that Python's parser uses under the hood.

However, I don't know if there are any screen readers that have been taught to do that.