Therefore, the committee decided to judge favorably all solutions exhibiting the correct ideas, even if they were not written syntactically error-free. This is a pity, since we believe that the many strong scripting languages and modular tools are one of Linux's advantages over its competitors. The analysis of the anonymous questionnaire which the competitors were asked to fill in also yielded some interesting results. Some found the limit to scripting languages too restrictive. This calls for a comment.
Every exercise is easiest to solve in a language one is familiar with.
Anybody familiar with both C and some scripting language would probably agree that these exercises can be solved in the latter with much less effort. This was intentional. What wasn't intentional is that we discovered the fact that high school students hardly touch on any scripting language at all and are thus unaware of their benefits. Rapid prototyping, for example, is quickly and easily accomplished from readily available tools. This is a complement rather than a replacement for the compiled languages.