Should programmers learn competitive programming?

not really

Does it produce good quality maintainable code?

@Demolishun Let machines do that.

Ain't nobody got time for that...

But seriously, just doing that thing doesn't mean someone writes good code, works well with others, etc.

@c3r38r170 Have you seen minified anything? ML diagrams? Write it yourself.

Every dev should learn code golf. It teaches you much more about a language than you realize.

Or are you talking about coding within tight time limits? Because that mostly just reinforces bad habits and practices.

@Demolishun it actually does the opposite.
For example there are many things in C you should do, that make the code more stable/safe, but cost time, and therefor are omitted in comprog. I attended a whole talk on the topic "bad C for good comprog"

It's a sport. Do it if you find it fun. Doesn't do shit to help with real life work and anyone who says otherwise is a college kid.

Should Artists take part in Art competitions?

@theabbie Apples and oranges.

@Root I think it's a valid Comparision, If something is done as a competition you think of ways to make it fast rather than of good quality, that's a good skill but not a good way to judge capability.

@Root or is it? Like, really. Is competition in art a requirement or even a benefit?

@N00bPancakes I actually agree and I honestly don't even enjoy competitive programming cuz whatever solution I build always fails unknown test cases and its frustrating (How tf am I supposed to know what I am doing wrong). I am only trying/bothering about it cuz of placement exams in the college require you to solve those problems to get into the second round.

@hashedram I get the point it doesn't help much in real-life problems but here to land a decent job in India is pretty competitive on its own and if companies use competitive programming as a metric for recruitment, I honestly don't know what to do.

@Root Imho, in a perfect world all files should be minified and tools should pretty print them on open and minify on save.

@c3r38r170 it’s one-way, though.

Unless you mean just stripping out styling and whitespace.

@BlackSparrow I hire in India and if I see competitive coding on a serious resume I pretty much ignore it. Doesn't tell me anything. Maybe 1 person in ten thousand gets a decent job from one of those things, but it's way too overmarketed.

Also, knowledge of algorithms is what people test in interviews. Coding competitions don't teach you algorithms. It's the other way around. You need to know algorithms to code in competitions. There's no sane reason to not just learn it from a book and practicing it properly. Attaching a timer to that process doesn't help.

@Root Yeah, not the hard minified thing, the light one. But, there could be token maps for the hard minifying... Idk, if someone looks for a solution, a solution will be found, but that's far from become a) reality and b) useful, unfortunately.

@c3r38r170 You could write your own e.g. vim plugin pretty easily; I just don’t really see the point other than saving disk space. It would totally kill custom alignment though.