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There is a Competitive Programming proposal at Area51.

As far as I can understand it, the proposal is about getting better at competive programming, a superset of codegolf. So basically this kind of questions

The benefits are clear:

  • Higher audience
  • More questions
  • We might get out of the beta

I belive that this would make this site richer. Practicing such things publically can also help to improve the own skill or learn new tricks (so our current scope would propably be a benefit for them too).

But this would mean that such meta-posts should not be forced to be CW.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Wondering if questions like this can be turned into polling. If the question owner creates two distinct answers for “yes” and “no”, I'd vote. (With “no” in this case.) \$\endgroup\$
    – manatwork
    Oct 12, 2013 at 12:01
  • \$\begingroup\$ Currently I look for input, something that I might missed, etc. \$\endgroup\$
    – Johannes Kuhn
    Oct 12, 2013 at 14:12
  • \$\begingroup\$ @manatwork Would you like to explain why you are against this suggestion? (and there are nice up and down buttons next to my answer.) \$\endgroup\$
    – Johannes Kuhn
    Oct 14, 2013 at 7:01
  • \$\begingroup\$ My personal opinion is not really Q&A subject. Short answer anyway: the current puzzles are suitable to brighten my day (either a tricky question or a clever answer) regardless I participate or not. But something lengthier like a competition will provide no fun just by reading through and I have no extra time nor energy to get involved in them. With the puzzles we frequently help each other improving (concurrent) solutions. I'm afraid this may go away once mixed up with competitions. (Regarding downvotes, I read they are kept forever and they trigger irreversible ban when a limit is reached.) \$\endgroup\$
    – manatwork
    Oct 14, 2013 at 8:20
  • \$\begingroup\$ Meta is different. - Regarding the question ban \$\endgroup\$
    – Johannes Kuhn
    Oct 14, 2013 at 8:22
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    \$\begingroup\$ "As far as I can understand it" being the operative phrase: no-one seems to know what the proposed scope of Competitive Programming is. \$\endgroup\$
    – Peter Taylor
    Oct 14, 2013 at 8:26
  • \$\begingroup\$ @PeterTaylor I agree. Maybe we should wait until the definition is clear? \$\endgroup\$
    – Johannes Kuhn
    Oct 14, 2013 at 8:37

1 Answer 1

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3+ years later, the Area 51 proposal referred to in this question is gone, but there's another proposal trying to get traction. Please support it if you're interested.

As for PP&CG, my impression is that the community is mainly interested in creating and solving its own puzzles, rather than solving/discussing puzzles created on other sites. So although CP questions might seem to be on-topic for PP&CG, in practice they are not. I think a dedicated SE site for competitive programming would make more sense.

Other thoughts on how competitive programming questions work on Stack Exchange sites:

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  • \$\begingroup\$ We don't have any issues with programming puzzles/challenges from other sites, so long as there's no violation of copyright or terms of use (which is the single most commonly-encountered barrier to having externally-posed challenges on our site). Your blog posts don't count as "other references". \$\endgroup\$
    – user45941
    Feb 5, 2017 at 23:52
  • \$\begingroup\$ That edit only addresses a very small and insignificant part of my criticism of your answer. \$\endgroup\$
    – user45941
    Feb 6, 2017 at 8:43
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Mego Your feedback is noted. I stand by my opinion that a separate site would be more effective. But it's probably a moot point since the real challenge is convincing people to come over to SE from Quora. That doesn't seem to be happening, other than a few lost developers asking off-topic questions on Stack Overflow. If the CPSE proposal doesn't work out, it might be interesting to try some CP questions on PP&CG to see what kind of response they get. \$\endgroup\$
    – RedGreenCode
    Feb 6, 2017 at 16:40

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