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Geek Olympics Code for Gold
Haydn Fenton writes "Wired has a recent article on the16th annual IOI (that's International Olympiad in Informatics), taking place in Athens from Sept 11th to Sept 18th. The 304 programmers from 80 countries will be competing in 7 marathon programming sessions to determine the world's fastest coder. The computers are being supplied by Altec and contestants will have a choice of using either Windows XP or RedHat 9.0. More information can be found on the IOI Website."
With a newer distro, the contestants would get newer versions of the tools (like Eclipse, Emacs, etc.).
I'm not criticizing; I'm just wondering.
-- I like my women like I like my beer: smooth, and not too gassy.
You must not know a lot of engineers. I know dozens and not one is moving anywhere near a mac. Of course, most of them are old hands who won't touch anything but a real Unix flavor.
Of the professional Mac OS X converts I know, most are software engineers or computer science types. They like the fit and finish of PowerBooks and like the Unix/Unix-like/NeXT roots of Mac OS X.
Most of the electrical and civil engineers I know are sticking to Win NT/2000/XP as their tools (Cadence, Xilinx Foundation, AutoCAD, etc) are not available for Mac OS X. Also most of these type of enigneers were actually happy to leave the Unix world several years ago when they traded in their Sun SPARCstations for WinNT boxes. To them the Windows world is easier and cheaper to deal with.
Back in the day (2000), I actually got into the final of the British Informatics Olympiad. I'm not sure what the format is elsewhere, but basically they sent out a self-administering test to schools (all the schools in the UK, I think) and had them run it locally, seeing how much of a few interesting puzzles you could write in three hours or so - you can find out more on the site. All programming, no justification, you were scored on results (in that round), which I thought was the way it should be - after all, results are what matters in real life!
;-)
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All the cool people were using C or Pascal. I used QuickBASIC! And yet I got the right results for enough of the questions (the C guy got his output board the wrong way up), and so I was invited to Cambridge. The best part about the first round was that I hadn't even done the last round right - I just said "yes, that's right" to the sample case and "No, impossible" to everything else.
Anyhoo, I got to Cambridge (for you USAians, one of our old "Ivy League" colleges) where I learnt to my relief that they had installed QuickBASIC especially for the two of us who had actually got in with it (15 finalists total) - they were shocked at having to, I can tell you! Of course, I was pretty sure at that stage that I wasn't actually going to win, and so I had a great time and zero stress. The tests itself were a) more of the same, but b) there was also an easay paper. Having not read much about the subject formally, I imagine I did dismally on the latter - I think I got about one and a half on the programming at best. Didn't know how to do efficient sorting! Still, it was great fun, and really set my mind on becoming a programmer.
The best part was, we got room, board and tours around Cambridge absolutely free (I guess they were looking to recruit a few of us to Cambridge). I even saw Stephen Hawking whizzing around on his motorised wheelchair! We got given two books at the end of it - Programming Pearls and Introduction to Computer Algorithms. Both darn good books, although I admit to reading the first more closely than the second.
Hah, I used QB in the IOI the two years I was in it. Got Bronze both times. A lot of the other people raised eyebrows - some were using Pascal, but all the "real" coders were doing C. At the end of the day, I don't think it mattered much which you used. (The second year, I was using C at home, but didn't feel comfortable enough with e.g. file I/O to use it in the competition).
There was -one- problem that I recall QB being a liability in. If you solved it the "wrong" way, processing speed and memory management became a bit of an issue, and you wouldn't be able to solve the larger cases in QB (the really large ones couldn't be solved the wrong way in C either). With an ideal solution, QB worked just fine, but most people didn't find it.
As one of those types of engineers, specifically an electrical engineer, I was not happy to see *nix go. At that time, the programmable logic device and tool vendors saw the migration away from $20,000 Sun boxes. As a result, they moved to Windows. Now, however, many of the EDA tools are available for Linux (generally, supported only for RedHat) since engineers, like myself, have been constantly requesting Linux versions. Windows is still the primary platform, but Linux is now viable platform for programmable logic development.