William wrote regarding 'Re: [OT]: topcoders: competition among
coders' on Fri, Dec 30 at 18:26:
> As I've become older and perhaps "more professional", I've become
> increasingly negative about programming "contests"; they are just
> TOO far removed from what makes a successful product in the real
> world.

Perhaps you'd find the Computer Language Shootout to be a little more
appealing?  http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/  Basically, the point
is to implement several interesting algorithms in several different
languages, to better quantify what languages are better at in terms of
lines of code required, speed, memory space, etc.  I've contributed
and tuned on several of the programs and found it to be a reasonably
pleasant way to spend an hour or two thinking about optimization
tradeoffs, etc.  It's also not for any particular personal glory -
it's just about completing the dataset and generally helping to better
understand what different languages are good at.

Or maybe that's detached from reality using boiled down code snippets
which aren't repreasentative of complex systems.  Either way... :)

--Danny
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