> It will teach you bad practices Agreed, everything that makes good contest code is a bad thing for production code. In a contest you just want to hack togeth

> It will teach you bad practices Agreed, everything that makes good contest code is a bad thing for production code. In a contest you just want to hack together something as quickly as possible, it only needs to work once, will never be maintained or documented. It's all good fun as a sport, but nobody should consider it relevant to working on production code.