Answering challenges with languages newer than the challenge
Somewhere Else, there was a long-standing rule that to answer a challenge, you couldn't use languages, language versions, or features that were created or introduced after the challenge was posted. If you did, the answer would have to be flagged as "non-competing." After some time, the rule was seemingly removed by consensus. The only real fear was that new languages would have some kind of advantage, but attitudes on the competitive aspect seemed to change over time (especially with golfing languages being created more frequently.)
I haven't seen any discussion in this community (or a written rule) so I wondered what the public opinion is. Stated reasons on the thread for allowing newer languages:
- Answering really old challenges with newer languages features. Otherwise old challenges would have to be reposted to allow newer answers, creating a bunch of duplicate content.
- Competition generally occurs within a language, not all languages or classes of languages competing. People understand that Jelly will always beat Java, but one Java answer could beat another, or maybe a C++ answer.
- "Catalog questions" like Hello World.
- Adding a built-in to your language really only causes you more effort, and might be downvoted anyway if it's obviously created to solve one problem. Coming up with unoriginal answers is only less fun for you.
- Some users would be discouraged from using newer languages.
2 answers
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Answering with languages newer than the challenge should absolutely be allowed
Most of the time, when a language is newer than a challenge, it's just a coincidence. By not allowing people to answer using them, we're discouraging people from creating and using esolangs. That would be far more detrimental than a cheaty answer whose language is optimized for the challenge.
Instead of banning them, I propose we simply discourage answers to a certain challenge if the language was heavily influenced by that challenge. If someone sees such an answer, they should downvote it or at the very least, refrain from upvoting it. That's likely all we need.
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Languages made specifically for a challenge after it was published
This is the general problem with allowing languages newer than the challenge. This is already considered a standard loophole, and the might be downvoted anyway... point will apply.
Some questions heavily benefit from this(cops and robbers, answer chaining), so it might be worth enforcing on those questions since language restrictions are a general part of the game.
Eitherway, manually specifying this rather than having it be a rule is better.
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