Re:My problem with the contest (Score 1)

It's not clear to me whether the contest format is as detrimental as you suspect.

The contest scoring also penalizes incorrect solutions and indirectly penalizes them further because active debugging chews up terminal time.

If you don't get a problem right on the first try, you usually have to get a printout and debug from there because a teammate needs the machine more. The ability to write small, self-contained bodies of code quickly and correctly could be seen as very desirable. Spending time with a compiler to rid your code of sloppy syntax errors is another thing that gets bred out of lots of contestants. The contest itself does not test large design skills but I don't see it creating bad habits there either. All of the better contestants know they're using certain shortcuts only because it's a contest. arthur