[dev] What do you guys think about competitive programming?

From: Kevin Michael Frick <kmfrick98_AT_gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2016 21:44:48 +0200

Hello suckless.org fellows!

I find myself competing in the national selection for the IOI[0] and
was wondering: what does the suckless.org community think about
competitive programming contests?

They certainly promote bad practices such as namespace pollution,
non-descriptive naming of variables, lack of comments and most of all
the use of C++[1], however they also really help in expanding one's
knowledge about algorithms and well-known computer science problems,
which in turn means better chances of getting a job in the CS field,
and they also draw the attention of a lot of students towards CS and
motivate us to be better programmers.

So, what do you think?

[0] http://www.olimpiadi-informatica.it (national selection),
http://www.ioinformatics.org/index.shtml (IOI)
[1] (you could implement whatever data structure you need in C, of
course, but since you can't bring templates with you on an USB drive,
writing std::set<int> is 100x faster than implementing a bug-free
red-black BST in pure C when you have 3 hrs to solve 3 problems)
Received on Fri Aug 12 2016 - 21:44:48 CEST

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