I think one major difference of CodeForces.com from other ACM and programming contest is the support of python, ruby, php, haskell and etc. It makes things more interesting. But from my observation, few people used these new languages. Part of the reasons is people in the community are not familiar with these languages and some of the languages are hard to debug. And another reason, I believe, is CodeForces.com measures the submission with same criteria, same memory limits, same time limits. But the performance of the language are very different. It makes it impossible practically. Probably codeforces.com could consider to give different criteria for different language, based on some kind of language performance benchmark. This could encourage people to use different language and be more fair.

It sucks. No other words.