No US College In Top 10 For ACM International Programming Contest 2013 199
michaelmalak writes "The annual ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest finished up last week for 2013, but for the first time since its inception in the 1970s, no U.S. college placed in the top 10. Through 1989, a U.S. college won first place every year, but there hasn't been one in first place since 1997. The U.S. college that has won most frequently throughout the contest's history, Stanford, hasn't won since 1991. The 2013 top 10 consists entirely of colleges from Eastern Europe, East Asia, and India."
Diagram. (Score:1)
Can someone draw us a diagram that explains the submission?
Yes, but . . . (Score:1, Flamebait)
. . . we're still number one in obesity, right?
. . . and . . . how come I never get those programmers when my company outsources . . . ?
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. . . we're still number one in obesity, right?
Uhh, no... [washingtonpost.com]
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Pay peanuts, get monkeys.
Re:Yes, but . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
. . . and . . . how come I never get those programmers when my company outsources . . . ?
For the same reason you never get a knowledgeable person if you dial a helpdesk.
Those outsourcing countries have internal markets as well, including normal programming jobs.
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TBH a lot of these people are not the kind of programmer you'd want to outsource your average business app to.
It's really more of an algorithm competition. The programming part is mostly concerned about getting a correct implementation, quickly. The winners tend to be people who 1. know a lot of algorithmic theory, and 2. can write and keep track of fiendishly complex code, with emphasis on conciseness.
I'm sure many of them can write clean and maintainable code as well, but it's not a requirement for this c
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Yes, I mean everybody who participate in the ICPC.
It's a contest where clever programmers do well.
The advantages and disadvantages of clever programmers are well known. These are all brilliant people who can write clever code, but not all of them will write code that other people can maintain.
Some of them are simply to clever to see why other people would have trouble following a piece of code.
I'm not saying their skills aren't valuable when you actually have a difficult programming task, but for outsourcin
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There probably is a correlation between obesity and a slothful mind, present company excluded, of course.
Re: Yes, but . . . (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, various small Pacific Island Nations are higher, then various Middle Eastern nations, then Mexico. Then US. Nauru and Samoa are 95% obese.
Re: Yes, but . . . (Score:4, Funny)
Actually, Mexico just took over the top spot for obesity.
If you wanna be the best, you've GOT to be hungry.
*shrug* (Score:4, Informative)
So what? I don't see any of those schools being real power houses of innovation either.
US programmers too clever to waste time in school? (Score:2, Redundant)
College might be considered a waste of time by the best programmers.
Another possibility is that the very clever are washing out of school before they even get to college. I once saw a study that suggested (not proved) that something like 20% of high school dropouts in the USA might be gifted.
In my experience most of the attention in public school goes to those that are ultimately ineducable. Gifted students are just expected to be fine without help. If they dropout, though, they're less likely to be program
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I once saw a study that suggested (not proved) that something like 20% of high school dropouts in the USA might be gifted
I would have thought it was closer to 80%. You have to be pretty smart to see the writing on the wall as a teenager.
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Also worth noting that you can study and practice for these competitions, there are books explaining good training routines. So it's very possible those countries just practiced harder for the contests.
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So it's very possible those countries just practiced harder for the contests
Quite true. Another possibility is that 'those countries' won fairly.
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Quite true. Another possibility is that 'those countries' won fairly.
I'm going to assume by "won fairly" you mean, "won because their universities are better than ours." Because I consider winning by practicing harder to be fair.
That's what the article seems to be worried about, are the CS programs in those countries better? As if I have any idea.
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That's what the article seems to be worried about
Damn! You got me.
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But thanks for presenting your incorrect opinion as fact. Reminds me I'm on Slashdot, where people think their ignorant opinions trump reality.
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http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1842587/can-you-answer-this-2009-acm-international-collegiate-programming-contest-finals
What an actual question from a few years ago doesn't count as a valid example? Whassa matta, proven wrong too often today? I don't have an example from the competitions from 20+ years ago to compare against, so I'm sure you'll invent whatever you want as an excuse for why I'm wrong and you are right. But I was there.
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You assume dynamic programming is required for a solution. Though the CS teacher there was big on recursion, so I'm sure some recursive solution would have presented itself.
The problem is not recursion, although that might make it easier to write; it's great you learned that in high school since most CS majors don't learn that until their second semester; the problem is that if any sort of straightforward approach is used (like the solutions shown on stackoverflow), the algorithm will end up solving the same subproblems repeatedly, and the number of subproblems will grow factorially as the input size increases. So you need some way to keep track of which sub-problems you've al
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3
0 10
10 15
1000 1010
Yours will print out 505, but the answer is 15
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That and I was deliberately giving a "correct" answer that takes 10 seconds and obviously isn't exhaustive because I thought it funny. The "real" solution I would have come up with would likely have worke
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Most of the contests I've been in, you had to data-enter your own data (type in the "official" data from the printed sheets) for testing, and a few would provide sample data in a file. I'm almost all cases, the sample data was the contest data. The actual run files woul
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In my experience most of the attention in public school goes to those that are ultimately ineducable.
Define "ineducable".
Gifted students are just expected to be fine without help.
As they should be. If you're bright enough you should be able to learn it by yourself. If you can't, then you're not as clever as you think. Genuinely gifted students, or even just the "pretty bright" (top few percentile) should be cheap to educate. There's the library, it includes computers and Internet access if your family can't afford them, they'll be an exam on the following material next Thursday. Attend the lectures if you want.
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The west is getting lazy (Score:5, Interesting)
Or better, it _is_ already lazy. I have done some competitive programming while studying, but it was a small group of students in a special elective course and only 6-7students in it. I already was a PhD student at that time and not taking the course, but I knew the professor doing it and he had told me that he was setting this up and also participating himself. Ended up being 1st until the professor and another student started "cheating" by using inline-assembler ;-)
Still, even in this specialized, elective course, only half of the student put any real effort into it. That is not good. Programming is something you need to be able to do reasonably well if you do anything advanced in IT, or you will never be any good at it. Historically, the west did protect its economic advantage by having better infrastructure, machinery and materials, but that is over. Any bright person with at least slow Internet access, reasonable English language skills and an older computer with Linux or one of the xBSDs on it can compete now on a world-class level, geography has become pretty meaningless. Or rather, being in the west is a disadvantage due to a pervasive sense of entitlement. Personally, I think this is a good thing. Competing on merit only is the only working way to identify talented people.
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Sorry, but you fail. I am not a programmer. I was not trained as a programmer. I work as IT architect, evaluator, auditor, designer, etc. I do program on occasion, but mostly for my own research. And I clearly see all these people in IT that cannot program and notice how often they do not get it, overlook problem areas, assign priorities wrong, misidentify critical items as non-critical and the other way round, buy products based on vendor propaganda instead of facts, etc. A second skill every IT person sho
HAHA FAIL (Score:2)
ntr
I did one of these competitions last year (Score:2)
Sponsored by a local company (probably recruiting) and not officially ACM-sanctioned. These are the kinds of competitions where if you practice you'll do much better at them. Our college had just rebooted their ACM club and I got the distinct feeling that had we been dedicated for years a team could place very high. We were around the 80% percentile or so and still burned 1/2 our time figuring out the logistics (physical space and PC access was limited). On top of that, we had a couple questions worked
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Re:Anyone surprised? (Score:4, Insightful)
Which of the Indian teams are represented? I see one at 60th...
Irrelevant. What's relevant: if there's little need in the US (or any other country) economy for software people, it is likely there will be no winners from US in the ACM competition (or winning will happen only as an exception rather than the norm).
In a sociological context, one needs quantity to develop quality consistently over time (that is: it is highly likely the talents need nurturing by an existing culture in their field for them to reach their full potential; and this requires quantity).
Note that quantity alone is not sufficient for the quality to emerge - if in need for another example, you only need to look at the today's music
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Irrelevant. What's relevant: if there's little need in the US (or any other country) economy for software people, it is likely there will be no winners from US in the ACM competition (or winning will happen only as an exception rather than the norm).
And yet the fact is the US has a huge appetite for software people. I know a bunch of ACM ICPC world finalists (like around 20), and at least half of them at one point in their lives ended up in the Bay Area working on software for some large tech company (yes, on H1Bs).
You can flame all you want about them "taking your jobs", but the fact is that there's a truly felt shortage of actually good programmers in the US. And it's not felt as strongly in other parts of the world, or at least that is my anecdotal
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It's "fascinating" that St Pete schools make the top 5 twice. No team from England, France, Germany, or India? Hmmm...
University of Central Florida ranked 48, that's gotta hurt anyone outside of China, the former USSR, and whatever other teams didn't just say "hey I know some C, WTF!"
I did a double-take, since "St Pete" to me, means Tampa Bay, and these institutions are both in the OTHER (Russian) "St Pete", it appears.
I had a short, if enjoyable time at UCF and attended one of their ACM contest planning meetings back when they were serious contenders. They approached it with all the determination of the Invasion of Normandy.
I don't have much use for programming contests, myself, since practical programming isn't something that easily adapts to such short time frames, but it's still pre
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Not really a fair comparison. ACM top 10 isn't the be-all and end-all of a nation's educational system, but the population of the countries you list don't even add up to that of the USA.
Population USA: 313.9 million
Population Germany: 81.8 million
Population Canada: 34.48 million
Population Australia: 22.32 million
Population New Zealand: 4.405 million
Population of California: 38.04 million
Population of New York City: 8.245 million
Re:Could be a good sign... (Score:5, Insightful)
What manner of "real world" is it where there aren't crazy deadlines and time to design and code properly?
Re:Could be a good sign... (Score:4, Funny)
This programming contests have nothing to do with real world programming or the skills need for most CS fields.
Phew, glad you cleared that up. For a second there I thought that the education system in the US had been flushed down the toilet!
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Yes, ironically, one of those "real world" skills that this may not test is writing and communication. Proofreading being paramount to the first, of course. So, your humor is on point.
Be nice if Slashdot had a "WTF!?" edit button. You get two minutes to fix your fails. After that, to the wolves with ye.
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Ironically, communication and teamwork is actually a part of this contest.
3 people in a team on one computer. Makes you think pair programming was inspired by them (given the long history of the competition).
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s/This/These/g. I is smart!
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Could be.
I did really well in these competitions during high school. Now I look back in horror at some of the code I came up with.
What slows me down today is all the second guessing I do now that I know what can go wrong.
There's a parallel
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Could be.
I did really well in these competitions during high school. Now I look back in horror at some of the code I came up with.
What slows me down today is all the second guessing I do now that I know what can go wrong.
There's a parallel in entrepreneurship. Many immigrants in the USA start businesses in part because they just don't know just how vulnerable they are to lawsuits and regulations. Many native citizens are much more cautious for fear of what the legal system or government might do to make their business life more difficult and they sit on the sidelines.
It's possible programmers in other countries are still in that exciting stage where they can code without fear.
Or, it could be that many immigrants in the USA start businesses because they have nothing to lose if they fail and everything to gain if they win. Like a high school kid in a programming contest, what is the penalty for failure? Now, take that immigrant who has made it past a startup or the high school kid is now working as a programmer, there is no longer "nothing to lose" and one has to manage risk. It has nothing to do with the legal system and everything to do with risk/reward.
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I don't see why young programmers in the USA would be coding with fear of the legal system etc.
They probably don't want to become the next George Hotz or Aaron Swartz. Copyright and patent lawsuits are becoming fairly common, one example is Lodsys suing small iOS app developers for using APIs in the iOS SDK. There are plenty of reasons why young programmers should fear the USA legal system.
Re:Could be a good sign... (Score:5, Informative)
I would guess that you've never entered one of these competitions. To do well, it is not sufficient to come up with quick and dirty solutions; these will generally fail. You have to be able to find a good algorithm, quickly, and implement it, catching all the edge cases. These are certainly valuable real-world skills.
Disclaimer -- I was on the Rice team that took 3rd in 1986 (before there were any international teams at all).
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Sure, if you can be quick and clean, that's valuable. But it's throwaway code by nature. You get no points for making the code readable, well structured, interoperable, etc. And, sadly, new complex algorithm development is the kind of development very few people actually get to do.
There are all kinds of programmers and skillsets The problem with these contests is they give the impression that this the "highest form" of programming skill. In fact, there are many important skills these contests don't address
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Re:Could be a good sign... (Score:5, Informative)
It's not clear why you think scalability and correctness aren't tested by these contests. A lot of the problems have huge datasets, so if you use an algorithm that doesn't scale, you will fail. And of course correctness is the point.......
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I looked at the input/output files for the 2011 and 2012 contests. The biggest files I found were on the order of 10Mb. That's not a huge dataset in my mind, not by a long shot. I'd bet that most, if not all of the submitted solutions would fail if given datasets on the order of gigabytes, or not run in any reasonable amount of time. Makes sense, they don't have to. But that's real world scale.
It's easy to dump on "professional" programmers, and yes, there's a lack of talent, but being good in these contest
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I looked at the input/output files for the 2011 and 2012 contests. The biggest files I found were on the order of 10Mb. That's not a huge dataset in my mind, not by a long shot.
10MB input is huge if you're solving traveling salesman. It's small if you're trying to count the number of binary 1's in that file. Your methodology of looking at the input size without considering the problem yields only a nonsense answer.
It's easy to dump on "professional" programmers, and yes, there's a lack of talent, but being good in these contests is no predictor of success in a programming career.
How do you know? Given that programming is highly IQ-loaded and so are these competitions, it
Re: Could be a good sign... (Score:4, Insightful)
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They may need to learn maintainability, but I'd wager that is an easier skill than producing the kind of efficient *and* correct solutions they come up with.
And I would disagree. It's a different skill, no "easier" than others and just as valuable, if not more so; maintaining code is part and parcel of all programming.
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I've seen too many students who thrived on this kind of work, were encouraged by professors and others for their talents, only to watch them crash and burn in the realities of programming outside of school.
Really? Why did they crash and burn? What was wrong with them? Because I've never seen that.
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Mainly, expectations management. They really liked the challenge of short term projects and solving these kinds of problems, but the day to day of long term development just burnt them out. Sometimes, raw skill isn't enough, and I have to say, they got some really bad advice on what programming careers for somebody with a Bachelor's degree looks like from professors that were out of touch. That was the real problem.
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I looked at the input/output files for the 2011 and 2012 contests. The biggest files I found were on the order of 10Mb. That's not a huge dataset in my mind, not by a long shot. I'd bet that most, if not all of the submitted solutions would fail if given datasets on the order of gigabytes, or not run in any reasonable amount of time. Makes sense, they don't have to. But that's real world scale.
File size isn't a good metric when many of the challenge problems boil down to graph theory, e.g. 2013 problem C.
And as far as running in reasonable time - in 2013 each problem had an associated solution run time limit, in the low seconds. Final scoring included a penalty for aggregate time, etc.
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[quote]The biggest files I found were on the order of 10Mb. That's not a huge dataset in my mind, not by a long shot.[/quote]
People have already corrected you on this - but holy crap is this a revealingly stupid thing to say.
[quote]but being good in these contests is no predictor of success in a programming career. [/quote]
It absolutely, demonstrably is - and you'll see former top competitors in important positions at pretty much all the big tech firms. Google, in particular, spends a tremendous amount of
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Google used to. And they've finally realized that it was an ineffective way to identify talent that works for them in the long term. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/20/google_hiring_procedures/ [theregister.co.uk]. I just interviewed with them, and they have dumped the brain teasers and puzzles completely. They are actually much more interested in what you like to do and the kind of person you are. Way overdue. Google did itself a huge disservice in letting people think you needed a PhD or to be "super smart" to work ther
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You aren't making this better - you're just making it clearer you don't understand algorithm complexity.
I'm not talking about in
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Funny, I was thinking the same thing. Nature of the beast, I fear.
Re:Could be a good sign... (Score:5, Interesting)
From looking at some of those problems, it seems to me that it's more important to be a better mathematician than a programmer.
Re:Could be a good sign... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, in that case its even worse! It indicates the US is lacking behind other countries in producing quality mathematicians!
And our company employs a lot of our programmers from the university maths department. With good reason.
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Ah, in that case its even worse! It indicates the US is lacking behind other countries in producing quality mathematicians!
And our company employs a lot of our programmers from the university maths department. With good reason.
Not only universities, but slashdot in general. How many times have we seen CS majors whining that they have to take math and, horror of horrors, foreign language courses. In the US if it's not marketable, it's not worth doing. And math is HARD. :-P
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And math is HARD.
English, on the other hand, is merely difficult.
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Which is the foundation for computer science. These are computer science contests, not programming contests. There's a huge difference.
Computer science is a science - it's the study of computing. Coding is required, but relatively secondary to the whole thing. You can apply what you learn from CS to practical things - that's what computer engineering is about. Then there's just the
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I have a masters degree in computer science and I consider me somewhat competent in the field. I think I could develop anything from a web app to a simple 3D game for you. With some of those problems however... I don't even know where to start.
Computer science is a huge field by now and people have to specialize. You've said it yourself- those ACM puzzles seem to be heavily biased towards the algorithmic side of things, and not really -computer science- as a whole, as that would also include questions about
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Of course, code monkeys don't need to know algorithms, but that doesn't mean they're not important.
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Quick and dirty solutions have no place in real world? Tell that to the customer losing a million an hour due to broken system. He will take whatever quick and dirty fix you can give him in a matter of minutes.
I am not sure which real world you are living in. But thinking and coming up with fixes at very short notice is a real skill needed in software industry. I have saved or recovered from several disastrous situations with quick and dirty fixes.
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I thinking of the world in which you don't want those problems to crop up in the first place, and when they do (and yes, they will), you want the fixes to work and work correctly, not just trade one bug for two down the road, then four.
Making those systems has nothing to do with quick or dirty. The reason they happen is too many programmers have to compromise in the face of unrealistic deadlines for fear of being replaced by new talent who writes code (too) fast, and makes headaches down the road even faste
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FTFY.
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Question: how much practice or training does a team do (analogous to how athletic teams practice and train before a meet or game)?
Quoting PP in full because it shouldn't linger at score 0:
Yeah, those grapes are sour. I competed in this competition and one year my team was very close to getting into the international final. Your criticism reads as something coming from a person who has no idea what these competitions are really about. I'll even help you out and give you a real criticism. These competitions test the ability to solve very difficult algorithm problems and the ability to implement those algorithms very quickly with zero bugs. The main limitation is that whatever the solution is, it has to be implementable by a very fast coder in a few hours. So the stress is not on managing complexity in very large programs, which is a very important programming skill, since you can't write a very large program in a few hours.
However, your criticism is way off. The focus of the competition is exactly on performance, scalability and correctness. If your program has any bugs, it is exceedingly likely that the automated test suite (that you don't get to see) will find it, and then you get zero points for that submission plus a penalty for submitting something wrong. No bugs are accepted. The main challenge with these competitions is that they will give your program large inputs and your program has to solve them within tight limits on computation time and memory use. If you break those limits, you also get zero points. So it turns out that the entire focus of the competition is exactly those points that you think are not tested by such contests.
If you had tried doing a competition like this for a while, you'd also realize that complex incomprehensible code is not a good way to go. The problem is that you have to write entirely bug-free code, and if you don't keep it simple, you won't be able to get the bugs out in time. Your 2 other team mates also won't be able to help you track down bugs if your code is incomprehensible. This is a team competition with 3 people per team and only 1 computer. So for debugging you have to print out the code and find the bug by reading the source code on paper - because the 2 other people on the team need time to input their solutions too. So you cannot rely on a debugger showing you where things went wrong. Which again means that you have to keep the complexity low. These competitions are far harder than normal programming, except, as I said, on the question of managing complexity in a large program.
But yeah, those grapes that you know nothing about must be sour. That's it.
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I'd admit that there is more focus on correctness and performance that met the eye, so I will concede those points. As for scale, the nature of the competition precludes the use of clusters, so while large scale implementations may differ, you can't get around that.
The thing about programming, sour grapes aren't that sour. I've managed to do okay without being on a world class programming team. I'm sure plenty that have are doing awesome as well.
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Yes, run fast and give correct results. Does it have to provide useful diagnostics if it gets bad data? Handle strange corner cases? Be maintainable?
Those are the real world programming requirements in question that don't apply here.
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call the waaambulanze (Score:2)
That's a huge difference. Programmers can program in C/C++, but of course would never do that if C/C++ is not the best tool to solve the problem at hand. You realize that a lot of universities teach functional first? Carnegie mellon adopted functional first in 2011 (don't know about right now).
Lots of universities teaching functional programming first =/= most of the top universities.
This inequality should be obvious to you if you were as brilliant as your words tend to imply you think you are. Whether you like it or not, top shit is written by top developers in C, C++ and Java, not Haskel or Lisp.
My university did that in 2006 with haskell.
So did you graduate recently (ergo talking with little experience) or are you just cheerleading?
So in a way the requirement of (C/C++) favors bad universities.
Non sequitur. Just because you say "in a way" so, that does not make it so. This statement of yours doe
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It's possibly related to the results. Many of the top-tier universities use less industry-friendly languages for teaching undergraduates. At Cambridge we do a lot of ocaml, at MIT they use Scheme (and, apparently, Python), at a number of others they use Haskell. There are several reasons for doing this. The first is that teaching a less common language means that you don't start the course with half the students thinking that they already know the material. The second is that teaching a relatively simp
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A fundamental misunderstanding by the non-technical administration and dinosaur faculty. As has been stated before, this is not computer science. I wish the state education boards would place requirements (algorithm and mathematical requirements) on calling programs computer science. We have a CSCI program that teaches Excel, and graphic design (zero algorithms and only basic algebra required). The programming courses do get into structures and sorting a little bit, but the last one I took left off linked lists! (didn't have time)
OTOH, it was within the last year that there was a /. article about major universities wanting to drop all of the math requirements from computer science degrees because it would encourage more people to enter the field. If you view a college as a business, the student as the consumer and the curriculum as the product, you may understand why today's computer science degrees have been so watered down. The CS department, like every other department is evaluated by how many seats they fill, at least on an und
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Well, if you want to market classes in Scheme, just mention that all the top-teir universities are doing the same thing.
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Agreed, it really is a shame that they dropped Fortran and Pascal.
What??!?? [xkcd.com]
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You can't do what I do in Haskell.
And I'd argue that a good programmer can program well in almost any language. I'd probably have to exclude brainfuck.
Perhaps *you* can't program well in Java.
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Proper CS students wouldn't touch code with a rented bargepole. See also: Djikstra, telescopes.
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The countries that have excelled at the programming contest recently are ones that stress rote memorization and that have, by Western standards, rampant cheating
So when the 'West' wins, it's all fair and above board but when the 'not West' wins it's because of unsubstantiated rampant cheating and the stressing of rote memorization?
I went to school in the 'West' and that's all that school was, rote memorization. I got excellent grades by cramming and accomplished all of my assignment work by 'reading between the lines' and understanding what the teachers / lecturers / private tutors were looking for. Young people are forced to attend locations under the most sub
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Why do people hate on the US you could ask?
Its an interesting (but off-topic) question. But if people are hating you, there is usually a reason. Think about it.
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If you're really that thin-skinned, you should get off the Internet
That works both ways, and since you're the one who started the whine thread, this will apply to you specifically, in this context. It's much easier to have a discussion when you preemptively rule out everyone who does not agree with you, but that doesn't add any value now does it?
But since you decided to start a thread, specifically to ask questions framed with sweeping statements about the mindset of everyone on Slashdot (we're nearing the 3 million UID mark), you are in fact trolling. A proper solution wo
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I'll assume that you take issue with my original questions and perceive the assumptions they make to be incorrect then.
No. I'm calling you out on your use of derogatory statements to bemoan the quality of discussions, specifically the parts that employ derogatory statements, or stereotypes if you will. That is bigotry. I'm not disagreeing with you on the point you so hamfistedly tried to make, but your implementation of it.
Maybe it is to jingoistic "patriots" like yourself.
Fuck you, you simple minded, filthy slut. There, balance restored.
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Yes, the US has been outsourcing programming to Russia and Eastern Europe. And Japan. (Just RTFA instead of believing the outright wrong summary)
FYI, India is a non-competitor in these algorithmic competitions. Seriously, they suck at it. (See http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3959807&cid=44247721 [slashdot.org] )
Re: (Score:2)
the US thrives because of smart people, so why not give incentive to the special ones to come over?
Define "special". I don't know anyone who objects to allowing genuinely exceptional or gifted people to come to the US based on their abilities and/or accomplishments (see 'O' series visas for example). However, that doesn't describe the vast majority of H-1B's, who may be competent, but have skills that can readily be found amongst citizens. It's a good way to drive down compensation though.