Coding challenge and practice sites

Anyone on hacker rank?
https://www.hackerrank.com/

Or leetcode?
https://leetcode.com/

Fschmidt, should you create a similar site to challenge them?

What is the point?  Programming is a useless skill unless it is combined with marketing so that one can start a business.  Getting a job as a programmer is a bad idea because modern programming is horrible.

To add to this, programming also sucks because of how competitive it is. With software it is really all or nothing. Social media, which is one of the major uses of software, is a natural monopoly, because people want to be on the same platform that other people are on. So if you make an alternative to facebook, no one is going to use it. Additionally it makes things easier in general if everyone uses the same software, so if your ambition is to just have a small base of users, it makes things difficult. For example, Luan is not compatible with numpy, so if someone likes or needs to use numpy then switching from Python to Luan would be a problem. Software is probably one of the most unequal fields in existence. The monopolizers get everything, and the average joe's software goes nowhere, so if the average joe wants any success he has to work with the monopolizers, otherwise the code he writes will go in the trash. It is truly one of the most frustrating fields to work in if you are an independent minded person. I envy farmers because if they work independently this does not invalidate their harvest.

It is pretty much the same story with farmers as I understand it.

How? If farmers are able to grow food, that food is theirs, and even if no one wants to buy it from them they can just eat the food themselves.

Maybe if you inherited land in some third world country. In the West you put a fortune into high intensity farming, deal with the monopsony buyers and banks under their terms and hopefully take out a larger fortune. A razor thin margin means the difference between being rich and going broke. Or at least that is how it used to be. These days you probably just have to go broke unless you sell out to the appropriate huge agri-venture.

I am not sure how true this is.  I have 2 programming business ideas, so I hope it isn't true.  I think there are always new niches to try.

About Luan and numpy, Luan is based on Java and I assume there must be some lumpy equivalent in Java, so it should be easy to add an API to Luan for that.  By building Luan on Java, I get access to the huge number of libraries available in Java.  The only real problem for Luan is that it is good, and modern programmers are vile human scum who hate everything that is good.  If it weren't for this, Luan would become popular.

New software does become popular.  Just look at TikTok.  It became popular because it is the worst imaginable crap, just what appeals to modern scum.

How about as a way of challenging programmers to keep the skills sharp. Give problems and purpose to good programmers so they can program for god

Why don't they program something useful instead?  I mean God forbid that anyone would actually do something useful.  Here are a few ideas: http://www.reactionary.software/needed.html