31–40 of 82 posts
I likely wouldn't do this personally out of pure laziness but good on you!
Nice!! I needed to understand some go scripts with work so I used Advent of Code as an opportunity to learn it as a new language and solve the next problem using it. Unfortunately that day's problem was more difficult than the rest so it took me more than a day to solve it, but it was a pretty nice way to ramp up on a new language!
Nice!! I needed to understand some go scripts with work so I used Advent of Code as an opportunity to learn it as a new language and solve the next problem using it. Unfortunately that day's problem was more difficult than the rest so it took me more than a day to solve it, but it was a pretty nice way to ramp up on a new language!
I had a similar thought after finishing:if you wanted to really learn a new language in depth, you could solve all 25 days using that language.
This year I used Python as my second language (still plan to finish) but with a strong emphasis on TDD and property-based testing since I'm already familiar, but not fluent, with Python.
In the end I lost the motivation once I only had the “regular” languages left. I was also solving them as quickly as possible (in Ruby) to get on the leaderboard so it was kinda boring to also solve them again later on.
great to see prof. might writing about programming again! im curious what he thinks about the ergonomics of the languages he used
Thanks! I have a part two planned to comment more about the languages / days themselves. This post was just getting too long to include it here.
We did a similar assignment at University many years ago. I think it was the same assignment, one per day for two weeks. Each time in a different language. The goal was to see how similar code is, and how little it matters which language you pick. Obviously it's a constrained problem set (we didn't have to learn all the ins and outs of each language) but it really opened our eyes to the "commonness" of programming, a…
We did the same but the idea was to do it in different paradigms: iterative, OO, functional, etc. And the code was very different
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve really missed his blog. I read his posts over and over during grad school. His story of pivoting from PL research to medical research (and being a star in the field) is quite motivating.
Thank you for the kind words! I missed blogging too, so I set a New Year’s resolution in January to write at least two blog posts this year. It had been over seven years since my last! I still hadn’t written one by November, but now I’ve got three for the year. I’m optimistic I can keep it up now.
We did a similar assignment at University many years ago. I think it was the same assignment, one per day for two weeks. Each time in a different language. The goal was to see how similar code is, and how little it matters which language you pick. Obviously it's a constrained problem set (we didn't have to learn all the ins and outs of each language) but it really opened our eyes to the "commonness" of programming, a…
I think that’s a pretty bad result of the exercise. The point of software isn’t just to do a thing. Good software should properly encode a domain or idea and communicate that to others.
If one took the analogy of driving a nail into wood, there are many tools that can do the job, but only a couple that properly handle the job. Because the goal isn’t to just drive the nail, it’s to do it efficiently and ergonomically and in a way easily communicable.
No FORTH, APL, Clojure or Rust? My HN bingo card is empty...
Both Clojure and Rust are not very fast to learn to the problem-solving level. Other languages like Java or C++ can substitute for them. APL probably too hard to learn in 1-day
Yes, I'm willing to tutor a student to test my claim.