On Monday, 30 July 2018 at 19:44:32 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer
wrote:
a lifetime ago, I competed using topcoder (and wrote a bunch of
problem sets for them too). Topcoder had a "challenge" phase,
where you could challenge the solutions of others.
Nice! I just found your profile and problem sets from 2003-2004.
I started using TopCoder in 2005, didn't see these earlier.
Is there anything like that in codeforces, and if so, is D an
advantage as a "somewhat obscure" language (i.e. competitors
can't always understand your code)?
Yeah, in a way. The challenges are called "hacks", and can
happen for the whole duration of the contest. But to hack
solutions for a problem, you have to first write your own
solution to this problem, pass preliminary tests with it, and
lock it so you can't resubmit. The key difference is, when the
hacked solution itself was not locked, it still can be fixed and
resubmitted (with a score penalty), which is actually a win-win.
As for how a different language helps, well, perhaps it does.
But, sadly, competitive programming style often goes against
readability, to the extent the language allows it. In that
regard, somewhat unexpectedly, I find other languages (e.g., Java
or Python) more readable than C++ despite the fact that I'm less
experienced with them. In C++, most competitive programming code
contains a bunch of the author's exclusive #defines for the
language shortcomings (or worse, #defines just to save typing).
And since #defines are so flexible, everyone has their own
version of the language, and some of the resulting code is
straight unreadable without a deciphering effort.
Ivan Kazmenko.
