Archives for August 2019

It’s popular on Quora to ask questions comparing competitive programming (or competitive programmers) with real-world programming (or real-world programmers). For example:

If you only know competitive programming, could you fake being a real programmer?

But how would someone “only know competitive programming”? At a minimum, competitive programmers have textbook computer science knowledge, just like other university CS graduates. And people don’t call new graduates “fake programmers” just because they have minimal real-world experience.

Here’s my answer to the question.

Why is this post so short? Find the answer, and links to a blog table of contents, at A Summer 2019 Experiment.

A Quora reader is wondering if technical interviewers are looking for a perfect answer (as required by an online judge) or if they’re more interested in conceptual understanding:

What happens in a programming interview if you get the answer wrong but show that you understand the concepts needed to be successful? (answer)

Why is this post so short? Find the answer, and links to a blog table of contents, at A Summer 2019 Experiment.

I worked on a math project for the first half of this year, so I was thinking about the issues posed by this Quora question:

Do I need to be good in math to do competitive programming? (answer)

Programming competitions are not math competitions, so they don’t usually focus on tricky math problems, and they don’t require the same level of math puzzle expertise. But the right math preparation can definitely make things easier.

Why is this post so short? Find the answer, and links to a blog table of contents, at A Summer 2019 Experiment.

Stack Overflow is working on changing their culture to appeal to beginning programmers and new users. Maybe they’ll succeed without driving away the expert users. But even if they do, it will take time. Meanwhile, people will look for alternatives, asking questions like How do I add more complicated questions to Quora similar to the ones on Stack Overflow? (answer)

Everyone has their own history with Stack Overflow and it’s hard to convince someone who had a bad experience that the site is the best place to ask programming questions. Nevertheless, it’s the best place to ask programming questions, as long as those questions fit the Stack Overflow model and you ask them correctly. You could even potentially ask a competitive programming question on Stack Overflow, though that requires extra care.

Why is this post so short? Find the answer, and links to a blog table of contents, at A Summer 2019 Experiment.