It seems a lot of people used the challenge to try out new languages. I wonder if Instagram received a disproportionate amount of entries in Scala, Haskell, Go..etc.
Totally. Two classes of respondent: people who thought, hm, fun, I'll use this as an excuse to dig into a new language, and folks who were looking for a job.
I really just wanted a t-shirt but got there too late :)
Folks interesting in silly excuses to learn new languages (and networking libraries) might also enjoy our 'hellod' project: https://github.com/carbonfive/hellod
We implement high-performance HTTP "hello, world" servers.
So far we have implementations in C/libev, Clojure/aleph, Clojure/jetty, Erlang, Go, Java/netty, Java/nio, Node.js, and Ruby/eventmachine. :P