Actually, that reminds me of a question I want to ask on the site.

Something about how to reach the handful of extremely bright kids who become obsessed with C-style optimizations, and absolutely cannot see the point of putting in the effort to write code clear for other people on projects that, because they are so very bright, they can bang out in a couple of hours.

These students are far more interested in CS than SE, so appeals to industry practice fall on deaf ears. But I need to understand what they write, and they get into very idiosyncratic and mathematical (with math-style variable names) territory.

Hmm

Probably best not to answer here. But feel free to compose an answer, and we'll end up with a nice HNQ if folks post them early enough. :)

Is that a classroom-management issue, or more of a student-motivation issue?

@BenI. In the question, please do explain what you mean by C-style optimizations. I thought I knew what you meant - execution speed optimizations. The 2nd paragraph made me question that, thinking it might mean code golf style coding.