On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 8:39 AM, Debayan Banerjee <debayanin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
People who participate in programming contest arenas spend a lot of
time
getting accustomed to the arena rules and keep practicing whenever they are
free. These arenas have a ranking schemes which require consistent
performance. If you are a student, you generally choose what you want to do
with your free time.
Why dont these people choose to contribute to free software instead? The
biggest reason is the learning curve. Going through the process of
interacting with developers online, making sure that a particular feature is
indeed required and then going to work on it.
> I remember Vignesh, my college friend, deciding to get a patch upstream. It
> took him many months to get a sorting bug fixed with a few lines of code (I
> think).
> For the coder who spends his day writing O(log n) code to lookup n-ary trees
> in limited time in programming contest arenas, looking for similar
> issues/challenges of similar level in real world projects requires an insane
> amount of time investment and also a lot of luck
> Hence, from what I have seen is that the really good programmers who are
> hooked onto the contest scene never look back at anything else. They just
> keep going.
> Can these people be converted to contribute to Free Software? Sure. We need
> to ask them one question: What is your code being used for? Is it doing
> anyone except you any good?
> That may be the only way to convert the best of the lot. After that active
> mentoring and hand holding for a little while is desirable.
There are FOSS projects, which are modular enough to be used
in setting up contest goals. A relatively gradual process can
therefore be used for such people.
Best
A. Mani
--
A. Mani
ASL, CLC, AMS, CMS
http://www.logicamani.co.cc