Well, I'm new here, but CodeGolf seems to exist because it has hard criterions for defining the winner. But you could also define other criterions without losing the CodeGolf principle: > The longest of the shortened programs which provides the expected output wins. Of course, we're still in CodeGolf, so it's not just about writing nonsense code. Still, the goal is to reduce any unnecessary character. We might downvote if someone seems to cheat by adding unnecessary characters. Maybe this needs a new tag like [tag:Code-Golf-Reversed]. Maybe this can be applied to other challenges as well, and we would introduce [tag:winner-reversal] which can be applied in addition to existing tags. Example: While the question remains unchanged, the winner of the [Reverse stdin and place on stdout][1] question would be [the C++ version][2]. The longer [C version][3] would not win, because it didn't make a reasonable attempt to shorten the code. [1]: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/242/reverse-stdin-and-place-on-stdout [2]: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/274/16901 [3]: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/12704/16901 Hard to understand? Well, not harder than any golfed code...