[xenocratus]

Competitive programming doesn't teach you only algorithms and data structures, it teaches you to think very clearly about program flow, edge cases, debugging etc., points which you seem to just gloss over from the comment you're replying to, just to justify a conclusion you had already reached.

[andrekandre]

definitely, alot of the "algorithms" in leetcode practice look deceptively simple on the surface, but deep down, there are lots of edge cases and are good practice to think deeply about them

on the otherhand, they can also encourage messy and hard to maintain code, or super efficient implementation can be brittle which you dont want in production unless there is a really really good reason...

if "competitive coding" also judge on other criteria such as clarity, readability and maintainability, in addition to efficiency and "correctness" that would be great imo