Saturday, July 23, 2011

Cool Delphi Answer: The Vigenère cypher as a code sample.

I would like to draw your attention to this answer on StackOverflow, where Andreas Rejbrand, a noted Delphi coder, has implemented for your pleasure, the classic Vignere cipher, a notable historical algorithm in cryptographic history because it resists casual attempts to decrypt it much better than ancient simple-substitution cyphers.

As a challenge, Andreas has asked anybody who wants to, to try to crack an example bit of text that has been encrypted using this cypher. Since you know the algorithm, and it's a historical algorithm, the most wonderful part of this answer is that I hope someone takes him up on this, and learns a bit about cryptography by trying to crack this cipher. Andreas has offered 100 SEK for the winner.

I consider it an epic mini-hack, and a nice bit of community on StackOverflow. As well, I consider that putting such effort into building a Delphi answers sub-community on StackOverflow is one of the brilliant things that can help new Delphi users take hold and begin to grow into competent (and eventually expert) Delphi developers. And that is the answer to the problem I wrote about yesterday.

I think Delphi is cool. And Delphi programmers are the coolest.

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