Is Python really not a good option for competitive programming?
Want to get into a Product Based Company?? Well, they need good coders and one needs to clear the Coding round to reach the interview rounds. Competitive coding is a platform that will test your coding skills as well as your speed. we will talk about python for competitive programming but first, let's know more about python.
Python is a dynamic language and its readability is the best of all. A 100 lines of c++ code shrinks down to about 15-20 lines when it comes to python. Python UI is very much like a notebook and yes everybody loves it. when it comes to development python is the most preferred one.
Key Features:
- The USP of Python is its language design. It is highly productive, elegant, simple, yet powerful. Python has set the gold standard in terms of developer experience and heavily influenced modern languages like Go, Julia.
- Python has first-class integration with C/C++ and can seamlessly offload the CPU heavy tasks to C/C++. Also, Python gives powerful toolset for Mathematics, Statistics, and Computational Science with various libraries like NumPy, Pandas, SciPy, Scikit-Learn. As a result, Python dominates the Machine Learning/Deep Learning/Data Science landscape and other Scientific domain.
- Python has a very active community and support. You can always find enough Python libraries and frameworks, no matter whether you are working on Enterprise Applications, Data Science, or Artificial Intelligence.
Now coming back to python for competitive programming. first of all, I do not consider myself a great programmer as it's been 4-5 months since a started cp using python but I do know that majority of students don't prefer Python for cp and the ones who do, are bombarded with the facts about Python being 5 times slow than c++ or java.
Well, there you heard it again and trust me that is totally true and the reason is simple that Python is an interpreted language. If you want to get into details then just visit this link.
Now, you know why Python is slower than c++ and java but does it make Python a language not to be preferred for competitive programming? Let's see...
Yeah, the above gif can be painful when the same logic shows no error on c++ or java
You must be quite familiar with TLE especially if you're more of a Pythonic. We all have been through this doesn't matter which programming language we use, so what do we next?? we try the efficient approach or the optimized one and it runs smoothly.
I don't remember a single time when my python code was optimized and it still showed a TLE error, so it finally comes down to one thing i.e., our logic for the problem. yes, it's annoying and you feel stranded when the naive approach mostly doesn't work but have you seen the brighter side of this? Python allows you to optimize your solution to a great extent and isn't it the thing that matters when the interviewer asks you to solve a particular problem in O(n) or O(long).
Some tips for python programmers:-
- Use iter tools.
- Use the concept of zip.
- Use enumerate to access index and value both.
- try to use the map function
"Be Pythonic but in an optimized way"