There are definitely a lot (more and more) developers here, and some very good school. After all the dirigeants of China are known for all having an engineering??background, so yes, technical studies are very popular and cultivated here.

But I also heard many complains about local developers being less creative, less advanced on new language and less likely to keep their skills up to date compare to US ones. Well that might be true for the majority, who knows, but definitely not for all as prove the data from worldwide competition Google Code Jam.

Annual global online competition where hackers are give "problems" they have to solve by creating a program in limit time and with??restrictions. All programming language accepted.

I was just curious to look around and find out that:

– most application to this competition come from China (1689 applicants form the 10,000+ total are Chinese)

– 5/25 finalists are Chinese this year

– Chinese developers got the 1st and 2nd place in the competition in 2008 and 2009 !

But last year Russian took the lead and 10 out 0f 25 finalists are Russians!!

What about the Indians would you ask?? Well they participated in mass (1500+ applicants), but none of them got into the finalists.

And Americans? 1/1297 got into the finals.

What??surprised??me the most is how popular is the competition is in China, there is usually a fragmentation between local events and foreign events and it seems difficult to get the information of each other circles. More over I thought Google popularity was not great in China recently. But it seems it is not true for developers.

Other interesting information collected though this competition is about the popularity of each programing language. If the 10,000+ participants use more than 40 different languages, the one most wildly use is??C++, 5 times more used than Java…

Check more about the Google Code Jam competition

And data of participation…

Final will be held in Japan in 2 days! Makes me dream to be a hacker..