we're working on a community for developers where coders can practice their skills by solving programming puzzles. Coders can earn "skill points" (programming, knowledge of algorithms, etc) depending on the puzzles they solve and on how good their solution is. We currently support submissions in Java, C/C++, Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, Fortran, Erlang, C#, Objective-C, LUA, Javascript, Scala, OCaml, Clojure and Common-Lisp.
You can check out the site at http://www.coderloop.com/
If you want to give it a try, I will appreciate any comment/feedback or suggestion you may have.
thanks!
- Federico Feroldi
I'll try to suggest more problems once I have time to dig in - how about adding infrastructure so members can submit problems themselves?
I wasn't sure when this version was released so I decided to look it up, 2.3.0 dates back to 2003.
We've been thinking about asking the users to rate the difficulty level of the puzzles once they solve it.
they're a bit hidden, in the next design phase we will give them better visibility
I'm not sure the ability to sort users by name is useful.
People may possibly be shy of showing how many times they've failed. projecteuler.net only displays the number of correct submissions for each user, and I'm personally very glad, as I can then try a variety of techniques without fear of losing "rating".
Of course, this may not be the way you wish to go, but I think many people would appreciate the option of hiding the number of failures.
In fact, if I may be pessimistic, I predict that if your website becomes popular, you will find people start opening multiple accounts in order to test solutions with one, and keep a perfect score with the other.
The issue is that it is impossible to debug these programs. I just submitted a solution. It failed. I get no input that failed, I get no message why it failed. While I can guess further inputs in this simple case (missles), for more complicated problems, this becomes simply impossible. Especially for more involved puzzles where subtle differences in problem definitions dictate the difference between a perfectly fine and a horribly wrong solution.
Sorry, but pretty much every coding kata site failes on this, and you did not manage to get this one (for me) crucial, make-or-break feature working.
In practice, I have spent an entire week during a universitary course with various problems from such problem site and eventually learned that the problem descriptios were different in a subtle way or certain edge cases were not considered or the test suites were flat out wrong. (This was particularly amusing, because they had added wrong test cases after certain solutions were accepted beforehand. Thus, It was clearly visible that the problem was solveable, because there were programs accepted).
Also I don't entirely agree with the argument that my program has to work in an unknown environment with unknown controls. In such a situation, I would at least get a logfile to see what was going wrong. Without that, debugging anything non-trivial is just not worth it without getting paid for it.
Add more problems and you win me over.
If you have any suggestion for kind of puzzles you would like to see please let us know :)
cheers
I like the idea, I wish TopCoder had a UI like this.
We try to lower the barrier as much as possible by not asking the users to create a brand new user/pass for coderloop.
When looking at this page it's not immediately obvious that I have to click on the name of the puzzle to go to it.
It helps to be able to see some examples and know where/what the guidelines are before you get started
