Programming contests can be fun, but it depends on the
competition, some barely have a focus on programming
but mathematics instead. I don't see them as promoting
bad practices, you are under extraordinary pressure so
this should not influence your programming practices
under normal conditions. I don't think the skills, that
are generally useful for programming contests, are
generally useful in other contexts. I hope recruiters
realise the differences in programming competitions and
what the employee will be doing, but that has merits
similar to any other contests, mathematics skills, and
other problem solving skills such as solving puzzles.
It shows competitive attitude and cognitive capabilities.
On Fri, 12 Aug 2016 21:44:48 +0200
Kevin Michael Frick <kmfrick98_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 - 21:58:23 CEST