On Wed, 12 Jun 2024 at 01:23, Jason McKesson via Std-Proposals <
std-proposals_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 11, 2024 at 6:15 PM Aeren via Std-Proposals
> <std-proposals_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> > 2. The example I gave applies to any setting that can be abstracted into
> that form, and it looked general enough that whenever you're dealing with
> optimization over multivariate functions, I thought that this proposal can
> be very useful. I'm not sure how adding "competitive programming" changes
> anything. Would it be better if I instead wrote "I found this
> abstractization in my production code"?
>
> Did you?
>
> Changes to the standard should be motivated by a desire to help
> working programmers do their jobs better. They shouldn't be motivated
> by people playing around with the language. People can do that, but
> the language shouldn't change just to help them. As such, citing
> "competitive programming" examples is not a *convincing* way to get
> other people to think that this is a problem that needs solving.
>

Because from what I've seen, competitive programming problems often seem to
be written to be challenging *for the sake of it*. To make you think.

Presumably, if std::set::partition_point got added and became the obvious
go-to solution for this type of competition problem, that type of problem
becomes too easy and won't be set. Because the solution is "just call a
standard library function", which is not challenging. So now the only use
case you presented, competitive programming, is no longer a use case. And
we would have something in the standard that nobody is going to use.

Of course if it's useful in real code outside of "hard for the sake of
making you solve the problem" then it _would_ get used, and so might be
worth adding to the standard. Which is why we're going to give more weight
to real world use cases, not speed running algorithmic puzzles.

Also, as a std::lib maintainer, I am at the sharp end of "I want to win
competitions but I want somebody else to implement the actual code and ship
it in a standard library". So I want *extra* persuasion that this is
actually useful.