We have arrived at the podium again, with an envelope detailing who won the contest.

Looking at 2011's solutions, we notice a few things:

• There were six contestants that sent in solutions. Two non-contestants also sent in solutions.
• Three of them sent in solutions to all of the tasks; three sent fewer.
• Therefore, by the rules set up, there are three people in the winning set: az5112, edgar, and simon.
• zbiciak would be in the winning set if he signed up in time.

Now for the difficalt task of figuring out who wins the contest. It was trickier this year than last year, for some reason. But we have the results right here, in this envelope which I, thanks to your excellent imagination, am holding right here.

For the purposes of suspense, I now want to remind everyone that the first prize is 100 EUR in Amazon books. There's also a second prize, 100 USD in Amazon books.

We have reviewed the solutions carefully. All four people who sent in all five solutions are clearly good programmers. Ours is the unenviable task of separating the good ones from the ones that aced the contest.

All of the four made some mistakes here and there. However, we find that simon and zbiciak submitted final solutions with more errors in them than did az5112 and edgar.

At this point I'd really like to point out that there were things that really impressed us about simon and zbiciak's solutions. They're worth a second look. We feel honored to get so much nice Perl 6 code to review.

That said, we're now down to two contestants. az5112 and edgar.

We find that between these two, the game is very even when looking only at tasks t1, t2, t3, and t4. Both contestants make some minor mistakes, and their solutions have occasional weaknesses. Sometimes one solution is more elegant than the other. They come out even on these four tasks.

The styles between these two are very different. You could say that az5112 is going function-based and edgar is doing it module/class style. Both contestants did things that annoyed us a little. az5112 fought against the medium sometimes, complaining in the comments that Perl 6 or the APIs weren't as he wanted. edgar's program comments were often completely redundant and mostly served to make already long programs twice as long. As reviewers, we have tried to see beyond our personal preferences and biases in this regard.

So things are very even up until t4. When looking at t5, who won the contest becomes apparent. The winner is...

...issss....

drum roll

Edgar Gonzàlez i Pellicer! Congratulations!

Please also give a warm round of applause to A Z — these are az5112's initals; we never got the full name — for winning the second prize.

Edgar, A Z; Both of you have been contacted by email about the Amazon books.

This concludes this year's contest. As things look now, there be a 2012 one around Christmas. So sharpen your Perl 6 skills until then, and sign up for another wonderful round of the Perl 6 Coding Contest. Thanks to all of this year's contestants for being so awesome.