I guess you could have contests for a specific language
But surely they would need to put that whitespace code inside a string or some variable. The method I am thinking of, would not ignore whitespace characters inside strings. Iāve seen this done successfully on TopCoder shortest code contests.
What about reading your own file?
Removing spaces is also an important part of golfing, for example replacing if x==' ' with if' '==x.
And in some languages (python{,3}), white space has a syntactic value as indentation, not counting them in would be the same as not counting braces for C++, for example.
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I agree, if you didnāt count whitespace for Python then you shouldnāt count semicolons in Javascript. Not really feasible. However, for python it would be nice to use tabs instead of spaces for indentation to save some characters.
I think one problem, which is difficult to solve right now, is that new players are getting pitted against top players pretty regularly. Must be pretty discouraging for the new players.
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You can use 1 space. 
Getting the same puzzle multiple times ruins the fun.
I can just paste in the answer before other people even finish reading it (it seems like a lot of people are doing this)
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Quite true, why not disabling pasting on those puzzle? Hackers will still find a way, I can think of at least one, but still, most of them wonāt bother so much anymore.
Also, more code size/optimization games! Those ones are tough but a lot fairer.
EDIT: something to screw them even more: a watcher script that watch the input area and when onchange, doesnāt allow more than one character at a time (still can be hack but itās starting to be trickier).
Besides other problems, that would completely break the codingame sync app.
Imo preventing paste is definitely a worse solution than the problem. People do want to use their own IDE, and if they donāt, they expect to be able to paste (at least internally) in the web IDE.
Also, not all people who copy/paste previous solutions do that to boost their ranking: for example I do that whenever I see a puzzle Iāve already done, not because I want to crush my opponents, but simply because doing the same puzzle twice is no fun.
Itās training? Isnāt that the point of CoC. And even if you didnāt want to, you indeed crush your opponent, you could have resign instead but by doing that youāll lose points 
Another idea that i get from our conversation: we should be able to quit a clash that we have alreday done without losing points
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Thatās why I support the idea of never showing the same puzzle twice to any user. Iād rather have a message tell me āno puzzle available for you at this pointā than see the same puzzles over and over and having to decide between cheating, forfeiting or getting boredā¦
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We have planned to deliver a few improvements regarding Clash of Code next week. In particular, we have changed the query that selects the questions.
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I also feel you shoud not win CP in Clash of Code.
The other day I did a 5 mins clash and won 800 CP -_-
Clash of Code is very fun but imho it should not count toward global ranking.
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Why not? It is just another skill that can be measured.
The best solution to the problem of āgetting the same problem multiple timesā is user generated content. This can generate virtually infinite interesting/fun challenges. (similar to codewars.com)
(I understand setting up a system for that is hard though, Iām pretty sure thatās THE best solution)
Also, itās not fair that javascript uses a function named readline() for getting stdin. I think you should rename that to something like r()
We will offer to CodinGamers the possibility to create questions for Clash of Code very soon ;).
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THIS. hundred times this.
Oh well ā¦ If youāre at it, Iād really like that bare commands in python print on stdout
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Oh come on, Java is so much longer than that. Python is about the same length. How can you be complaining?
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