Why aren’t more people using ProjectEuler?

In the current Indian curriculum of academics, there is a heavy focus on Math, almost mandatorily, atleast till the 10th grade. Somehow, over time, this subject gets pushed further away into the background until it finally reaches the nadir of its level of importance once we start pursuing professional careers. But we believe that, software engineers, coders and basically anyone with a logical bent of mind would greatly benefit from ProjectEuler.net. (It greatly helps in solving problems on this site if you can program in atleast one functional/ imperative language).

ProjectEuler was created by Colin Hughes because he wanted to enable people to solve problems that they would “itch to solve” once they went through them. The site was created by him and later maintained by upto and over a dozen others who shared this passion of his. The site features 495 problems as of end-of-December 2014, periodically updated with one problem per week except during the summer. The solving of problems is incentivized by the awarding of “medals” for every 25-problem-milestone, apart from a host of other medals for various other achievements – for e.g. the “Centurion” award is given to you when you complete a hundred problems.

 

Problem-Solving awards

 

A host of programming languages can be used to solve the problems – C, C++, Python, Java, Fortran, APL, Scala etc. It also helps that the arrangement of problems is done in a very “inductive” manner. One can also sort the problems in the descending order of “Number of people who have already solved the problem” so as to guage the level of difficulty and proceed from solving the easiest ones first to boost confidence levels 🙂

So, why isn’t this website more popular? Probably because of a lack of advertising or promotion. It currently ranks 43598 on the Alexa ranking charts. We feel it deserves better and this is our bit to get it slightly higher up on the charts 🙂

A full article presenting why Colin decided to build the site and more can be obtained at this link:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/print/2011/06/how-i-failed-failed-and-finally-succeeded-at-learning-how-to-code/239855/

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