I’ve spent the last few months working with my friends Frank, Henry, and Eliot to design the 29th annual ICFP Programming Contest.
The contest began an hour ago (I meant to mention this sooner, sorry!) and runs for 3 days. If you’d like, you can sign up at icfpcontest2026.com.
Of course, we spent a lot of time thinking about how to design a fun programming contest in the age of AI agents. It would not be satisfying if the winning strategy for the contest was to run an unmonitored agent in a loop for 72 hours.
a simple program in the littleman language
So for the contest we’ve designed a new language we call “littleman.” Littleman programs are two dimensional and place a heavy emphasis on spatial reasoning - your little men must physically walk over instructions to execute them, and they exchange data with “pipes” that you draw in your program’s source code.
We’ve written a textbook about the littleman programming language. It’s open to everyone, so you can check it out even if you’re not registered for the contest.
Enjoy!