Which Programming Language should one master to become the best Competitive Programmer 👨💻👨💻
Hey CodingHumans What's Up. So today here we are going to talk about the biggest question that arises in the mind of every freshmen who have just snuck into the world of coding and even sometime this questions arises among the one who are already into these field of programming .The question is which programming language should one master to be the Coding God , or to be the best Competitive Programmer. So today here in this blog I am going to clear all of your doubts and help you choose the best programming language for becoming a skilled Competitive Coder. So without any further delay lets gets inside this topic
As we all know that there are several programming languages that can be used for programming. As per the wikipedia source we can say there are about 700 programming languages among which 50 are the most famous and the most used one. This 50 Programming languages are: -
Python Java JavaScript C# C C++ PHP R Objective-C Swift TypeScript MATLAB Kotlin Go (Golang) VBA Ruby Scala Visual basic Rust Dart Ada Lua Abap Groovy Perl Cobol Julia Haskel Delph Elm PowerShell SQL Clojur Elixir Pascal LISP Ballerin FORTRN BASIC Alice COBOL Speakeasy Simula Smalltalk Scratch Erlang Ada Eiffel Rebol Prolog
So by seeing this languages you guys must be wandering , Damn ! So many programming languages ,there are programming languages whose names you might have not even heard of , looks crazy right dont worry I will make you clear about which programming language is the best one so lets get deeper to see which programming language is the best one.
Okay so there are several programming languages supported in International Collegiate Programming Contest ( ICPC ), including C/C++ and Java , Python , Javascript and many more as mentioned earlier.
Then Which programming languages should one aim to master competitive programming?
Our experience gives us this best answer: We prefer C++ with its built-in Standard Template Library (STL) but we still need to master Java . Athough Java is slower, as compared to C plus plus Java has powerful APIs and built-in libraries such as BigInteger/BigDecimal to handel big datatypes, GregorianCalendar to automatically get built in time APIs , Regex , etc. Java programs are easier to debug with the virtual machine’s ability to provide a stack trace 7Personal opinion: During the time of 2012 The International Olympiad in Informatics competition rules, Java was not supported in IOI It was so bad for java programmers those days .The programming languages allowed in IOI were C, C++, and Pascal. But on the other side, the International Collegiate Programming Contest ( ICPC ), World Finals (and thus most Regionals) allows C, C++ and Java to be used in the contest.However Java is accepted in todays time of The International Olympiad in Informatics contests. Therefore, it is seems that the ‘best’ language to master is C++ as it is supported in both competitions and it has strong STL support. If IOI contestants choose to master C++, they will have the benefit of being able to use the same language (with an increased level of mastery) for ACM ICPC in their University level pursuits.
As when it crashes (as opposed to core dumps or segmentation faults in C/C++). On the other hand, C/C++ has its own merits as well. Depending on the problem at hand, either language may be the better choice for implementing a solution in the shortest time. Suppose that a problem requires you to compute 25! (the factorial of 25). The answer is very large: 15,511,210,043,330,985,984,000,000. This far exceeds the largest built-in primitive integer data type (unsigned long long: 264 −1). As there is no built-in arbitrary-precision arithmetic library in C/C++ as of yet, we would have needed to implement one from scratch. The Java code, however, is exceedingly simple (more details in Section 5.3). In this case, using Java definitely makes for shorter coding time.
import java.util.Scanner; import java.math.BigInteger; class Main { // standard Java class name in UVa OJ public static void main(String[] args) { BigInteger fac = BigInteger.ONE; for (int i = 2; i <= 25; i++) fac = fac.multiply(BigInteger.valueOf(i)); // it is in the library! System.out.println(fac); } }
Mastering and understanding the full capability of your favourite programming language is also important. Take this problem with a non-standard input format: the first line of input is an integer N. This is followed by N lines, each starting with the character ‘0’, followed by a dot ‘.’, then followed by an unknown number of digits (up to 100 digits), and finally terminated with three dots ‘...’.
3 0.1227... 0.517611738... 0.7341231223444344389923899277...
One possible solution is as follows:
#include <cstdio> using namespace std; int N; // using global variables in contests can be a good strategy char x[110]; // make it a habit to set array size a bit larger than needed int main() { scanf("%d\n", &N); while (N--) { // we simply loop from N, N-1, N-2, ..., 0 scanf("0.%[0-9]...\n", &x); // ‘&’ is optional when x is a char array // note: if you are surprised with the trick above, printf("the digits are 0.%s\n", x); } } // return 0
Not many C/C++ programmers are aware of partial regex capabilities built into the C standard I/O library. Although scanf/printf are C-style I/O routines, they can still be used in C++ code. Many C++ programmers ‘force’ themselves to use cin/cout all the time even though it is sometimes not as flexible as scanf/printf and is also far slower. In programming contests, especially he International Collegiate Programming Contest ( ICPCs ), coding time should not be the primary bottleneck. Once you figure out the ‘worst AC algorithm’ that will pass the given time limit, you are expected to be able to translate it into a bug-free code and fast! Now, try some of the good coding problems given from online coding platforms like HackerRank ,LeetCode, geekforgeeks and try solving in lesser line of codes and if your are not able to solve the problems then , you should revisit and update your knowledge of your programming language(s)! A mastery of the programming languages you use and their built-in routines is extremely necessary.
