[bawr]

Well, it all depends. I would agree with the main premise - that a little friendly competition is motivational, but the operative words are - wait, that didn't come out right - "a little", and "friendly competition".

I trust my code to be optimal, or I know where it isn't and leave it at that, since I don't feel like / have time to tune it. If somebody fixes it I'm always interested to know how he did it in the former case, and I'm simply grateful in the latter case. And if I rewrite someone else's code for the better, I do feel good - not because I "beat" him, but because the code is better now. And isn't such a stepwise refinement a worthy goal?

[kscaldef]

> I trust my code to be optimal, or I know where it isn't and leave it at that

That's a pretty remarkable claim, unless you religiously profile all of your code.

[bawr]

Well, it's optimal, not optimized. So let me re-phrase that in a way that's more realistic - I trust my algorithm choice to be optimal, and my code expresses those algorithms in a simple way, which get a good speed to cleanness ratio. :)

[kscaldef]

I still say that's a remarkable claim. Modern computers are complicated (not to mention language runtimes and frameworks), and few applications admit straightforward algorithmic analysis.