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Competitive programming is useless

kislayverma.com

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Re: Competitive programming is useless

#71

Post by zsmi »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #52
junon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this. My home state's college's CS program boasted it was one of the best in the northwest. My friends that went through it constantly had to ask me to explain simple stuff to them because the professor's assignments were wrong or confusing. Compare that to our local community college, which seemed to have a much more well-rounded course and taught the fundamentals in a way that made much more sense. Anecdotal…

The fact that so many people are getting CS degrees and yet can't even FizzBuzz is alarming. Is it the students? How many people are going into CS because they've had a taste of programming somewhere outside of school and decided they want to be a software engineer, and how many of them just get into CS because they heard that CS grads have very good employment prospects (Low unemployment, high salaries)? Anecdotally…

We had a decent solution to this in my undergraduate school.

Tests were basically all theory. Practical knowledge came from labs and everyone did the majority of their homework on lab computers that had no network connection. Not everyone was a rockstar of course, but as I recall pretty much everyone was at least a passable programmer in the end. Of course that was the early 90s...

Re: Competitive programming is useless

#73

Post by baobabKoodaa »

jcranmer wrote: post #18

I'd disagree with this assessment. In my own experience, I've found that competitive programming is useful in teaching a few skills. However, the apparent point of competitive programming--building up a good repertoire of advanced algorithms and data structures--is pretty close to useless. In my professional career, the most complex algorithm I've ever had to code myself is ... union-find (on like two occasions), wit…

> However, the apparent point of competitive programming--building up a good repertoire of advanced algorithms and data structures--is pretty close to useless.

That's not the point of competitive programming. If you talk to anybody who is good at competitive programming, they will tell you it's _not_ about memorizing algorithms and datastructures. It's about developing algorithmic problem solving skills; skills that you can leverage to design (create) algorithms, in order to solve problems.

Re: Competitive programming is useless

#74

Post by tempodox »

alerighi wrote: post #34
jcranmer wrote: post #18

I'd disagree with this assessment. In my own experience, I've found that competitive programming is useful in teaching a few skills. However, the apparent point of competitive programming--building up a good repertoire of advanced algorithms and data structures--is pretty close to useless. In my professional career, the most complex algorithm I've ever had to code myself is ... union-find (on like two occasions), wit…

To me competitive programming doesn't make you a good software engineer. It will teach you bad practices, like abusing of dangerous programming constructs or data structures to optimized the code or just save some typing while writing the code (like one letter variable names, macros, etc), global variables and state in the program, not using common design patterns, not using OOP, not documenting the code and in gener…

Not using OOP is a bad practice? That's a hard sell.

Re: Competitive programming is useless

#76

Post by baobabKoodaa »

jcranmer wrote: post #18

I'd disagree with this assessment. In my own experience, I've found that competitive programming is useful in teaching a few skills. However, the apparent point of competitive programming--building up a good repertoire of advanced algorithms and data structures--is pretty close to useless. In my professional career, the most complex algorithm I've ever had to code myself is ... union-find (on like two occasions), wit…

> Almost everything you will ever need is already implemented in a library for you to reuse, and even reaching for that library is pretty rare.

Developers who have no interest towards algorithms will not even have the skills required to identify opportunities where algorithms should be used, much less the skills required to identify which algorithm should be used. For example, I had a conversation here on HN a few weeks back where somebody said that they will not need to learn anything about sort algorithms, because they can just google bubble sort and copypaste it if they need sorting at work. And that's how you end up with 5-minute load times for GTA.

Re: Competitive programming is useless

#77

Post by mvanaltvorst »

Competitive programming is fun and trains quick and accurate problem solving. You can critique the fact that modern programming interviews seem to be too focused on short leetcode problems, but that is an entirely different field than competitive programming.

"Mathematical textbook problems are useless, because scribbling mathematics in a notebook is not best practice! Real mathematicians exclusively spend their time writing academic papers."

Re: Competitive programming is useless

#78

Post by kvathupo »

gmadsen wrote: post #16
kwertyoowiyop wrote: post #4

> Assuming for a minute that students from lesser tier colleges are less smart (possibly untrue but again a discussion for another day) Let’s discuss it now: they are NOT ‘less smart.’

obviously we are talking about statistics, so of course specific examples exist that run counter to the trend. But without a doubt, I am 100% certain that on average the incoming CS class to MIT is smarter than students in the cs program at some very low ranked state school. you can see the difference in which textbooks the school uses. It would be impossible to teach real analysis with Rudin at an average school or…

Although I agree that the average student at one of those schools is much better than one at a lower ranked school, I think there is a false equivalency at play here. Enrollees in Math55 are not representative of all math students at Harvard.

In my experience, the average student of a prestigious institution is just as good as an upper decile student from a decent university. That said, the top end of those at top colleges are truly world-class. At the end of the day, these universities have historically educated the elite: there is discussion to be had on legacy admissions and paper-mill research groups that pad the resumes of high school applicants with research of little merit.

Re: Competitive programming is useless

#79

Post by natdempk »

derefr wrote: post #66
jcranmer wrote: post #18

I'd disagree with this assessment. In my own experience, I've found that competitive programming is useful in teaching a few skills. However, the apparent point of competitive programming--building up a good repertoire of advanced algorithms and data structures--is pretty close to useless. In my professional career, the most complex algorithm I've ever had to code myself is ... union-find (on like two occasions), wit…

I’d love a programming competition that wasn’t about speed of implementing algorithms, but rather was about speed of implementing solutions, using a provided standard library of algorithms and data structures. Competitive glue-code programming, per se, but glue code that still requires that you understand the need for specific advanced algorithms in order to pull them out of a toolbox.

Isn't this basically what competitive programming is? Maybe I'm a bit clueless, but my assumption was most people have standard libraries of common algorithms/implementations they pull from and tweak/glue as needed to fit the problem in front of them. Those libraries are not standardized, but there is for sure basically a common set of things you need to be competitive, right?

Re: Competitive programming is useless

#80

Post by anonymoushn »

alerighi wrote: post #34
jcranmer wrote: post #18

I'd disagree with this assessment. In my own experience, I've found that competitive programming is useful in teaching a few skills. However, the apparent point of competitive programming--building up a good repertoire of advanced algorithms and data structures--is pretty close to useless. In my professional career, the most complex algorithm I've ever had to code myself is ... union-find (on like two occasions), wit…

To me competitive programming doesn't make you a good software engineer. It will teach you bad practices, like abusing of dangerous programming constructs or data structures to optimized the code or just save some typing while writing the code (like one letter variable names, macros, etc), global variables and state in the program, not using common design patterns, not using OOP, not documenting the code and in gener…

Not using design patterns seems like pure upside.

I don't think it's reasonable to use a library for most things one implements in competitive programming, because the work of getting your problem instance in and out of the library is probably greater than the work of writing the solution yourself, in code length and in runtime. As an example, the only time I ever needed to use A* was on a state space that was larger than the main memory of any computer on Earth. I don't expect that I can download a library that does A* on abstract state spaces not fully present in RAM for me, but I can just bash out my own A* that's fused with the definition of the state space. Maybe this is so easy to do partially because I did a bunch of programming contests in which I wrote BFSes that were fused with the definitions of graphs.

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