[plt-scheme] Last year students...

Matthias Felleisen wrote:
> Most contests don't and portray
> programming in a way that I would not want to have to
> do anything with it.

This is probably best discussed on plt-edu, but since Joshua asked his 
question here, let me add to Matthias's comment. Think about what most 
contests are asking students to do: to quickly write programs under time 
pressure, using algorithms and data structures they only dimly 
understand, with no design process, where the only important thing is to 
produce output matching the judges' solution -- and then to throw the 
code away forever. This is completely antithetical to everything we 
teach them in our courses. Contests work to undermine the principles of 
proper software development. (I have not looked at Joshua's specific 
links; I'm talking about ACM, TopCoder, and others of this sort.) --PR