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)
