Puzzle Websites to Sharpen Your Programming Skills

Can 222,375 women deliver a child in 0.000040472 months?

I like the uva onlinejudge, spoj is pretty good too: http://www.spoj.pl/

Indeed, this is the one my University's CS club uses. It has really interesting puzzles, and you can submit code to it.

> Btw, I think that some people want to use difficult languages at work to make their job more challenging.

Like Java or C++? I'd rather stick with the easy stuff like Haskell, the problems at hand are challenging enough.

I remember doing some of Dave Thomas' code katas when he first posted them, and thinking that they were fun but a bit pointless, and generally rather too easy to learn much from. The other month at work I did a presentation at work on Andy Hunt's theories of programmer skill development where I mentioned katas, saying that I didn't really see they had much value. However, Ron Jeffries' celebrated failure to write a sudoko solver puts a slightly different perspective on this.

If your daily work involves doing algorithmic stuff, even if it's only moderately demanding, then I don't see that you will get much benefit from doing the same sort of thing at a more noddyish level.

However, if your daily work isn't like that, if perhaps it is in the vicinity of what used to called Data Processing (e.g. implementing payroll systems), then I can easily imagine that your coding chops might get rusty. In which case, taking deliberate steps to avoid that would be sensible.

[This argument only applies to the question of puzzles improving ones work, rather than being fun.]

If you're at work, no, it's not about clever problem solving. In my spare time though, I prefer to solve bigger problems than parsing CSV files into databases.

Does working on your serve improve your tennis game?

For algorithms training[1], the USA Computer Olympiad training program is also excellent: http://train.usaco.org/usacogate

[1] basically from scratch; it's suitable for smart highschoolers with some programming experience. That website has been responsible for more than a few IOI medals.

Can't you call C functions from pretty much any language worth it's salt nowadays? What are the problems that are intractable in other languages?

Interesting. Which ones?