-Wave-'s blog

Google Code Jam stats: Languages and regions by advancement rate
By -Wave-, 9 years ago, In English

When I was reading statistics from http://www.go-hero.net/jam/15/ (great site, by the way), I noticed that sorting the countries by "Qualification round" and "Remaining" yields different results, so I wondered — what percent of participants advance per region? Per language? I wrote a little program to find out, here are the results:

Regions: http://pastebin.com/iteGLwqk

Languages: http://pastebin.com/Z6Ky63SY

Some things to note:

-There are limitations here. The number of participants is calculated as the sum of participants in 1A, 1B and 1C. However, participants could've participated in more than one of the subrounds, skewing the results.

-Language statistics are affected by the fact that go-hero counts the language even if the participant wrote just one solution in it. That leads to strange statistics — LOLCODE, for example, has a 100% advancement rate.

-Yay, Haskell!

Even though this is far from accurate, I found it interesting and I hope you will too.

Another thing that surprised me: compare the languages graph of China and United States.

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9 years ago, # |
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You are missing Cayman Islands — 100.0% advanced ;)

Interesting analysis. I'd like also to add something I already mentioned in different post — Python pushed Java to third place in popularity. At least among 3,000 top Codejammers.

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    9 years ago, # ^ |
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    Congratulations! Having a 100% advance rate is a great accomplishment (and you did it all on your own!), however I only included countries with over 50 participants so that the data is at least slightly meaningful :)

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      9 years ago, # ^ |
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      There are some other interesting countries on the list, like Vatican or Antarctica (Google thinks it's country — then it's country). Greenland also has 100.0% ratio.

      For me the most eye-popping and least understood number is the one for India. Largest by far number of people entering competition and lowest success ratio. What is so special about India?

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        9 years ago, # ^ |
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        Hehe :D

        The current hype in India is becoming a software engineer. There are memes which expresses things like, if an Indian couple gets a child, the dad says, "If it is a daughter, she becomes a doctor(pun not intended) and if it is a son, he becomes an engineer". And for a software engineer, it is a big deal here to do well in CodeJam because people write it on their resumes :)

        The result? People like me, who don't give a shit about getting an engineering job, but who are decent at competitive programming, become famous ;)

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          9 years ago, # ^ |
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          I failed to get the pun, intended or not, but I do agree with what you are saying. Being in an engineering college in India I get to see too many victims of parents ambitions/hopes/dreams/aspirations.

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            9 years ago, # ^ |
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            "daughter" and "do(c)tor" are homophones ;)

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9 years ago, # |
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It would be interesting to incorporate population of a country to reflect on

  • How popular is competitive programming in a country.
  • How well does a country perform on a relative basis per million of people (e.g. how many people per million have advanced to Round 2).

(Denominator for China and India will be pretty large here).

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    9 years ago, # ^ |
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    And denominator for Lithuania pretty small ;)

    Yes, I agree that would be very interesting.

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