26 Programming Languages in 25 Days

rust is def not a language you can pick up in a day.

It took me a week from a cold start to get a working mergesort toy example working. By comparison, elixir took me 1.5 hours. 2 to make it multicore.

The semantics of a language shape its use in practice, though.

For example: If you're in a language that primarily uses recursion as the primary iteration mechanism, if you have to iterate through every element of a tree you will just about never do a breadth-first search unless it is absolutely necessary. It's just a pain to express recursively compared to a depth-first traversal. In contrast, in an iterative language, a breadth first traversal is the same (somewhat obnoxious) complexity as any other traversal. But that's assuming both languages would be traversing a tree at all: trees are vastly more likely to be used at all in languages where recursion is the norm.

Like, sure, any iterative function of the form:

    f(x) = {
      state = h(x)
      cond = true
      while(cond) do
         state = j(x,state)
         cond = k(x,state)
      end
      post_work = l(state,x)
      return post_work
    }

Can be re-written as

    f(x) = l(m(x,h(x)))
    m(x,state) = state if k(x,state) else m(x,j(x,state))

But if your language only supports one or the other, you're going to approach the problem in fundamentally different ways. Whereas the iterative solution is likely to jump directly into the loop with a trivial h(), the functional language is far more likely to do more work in h() to offload work out of j() prior to what would likely end up being a fold operation.

Put another way: for(i=0;i<x;i++) loops are common in iterative codebases I've worked on, but it's exceedingly rare to see f(x,i) = blah return f(g(x),i++) in a functional codebase.

Ah, the HN Classic™: "I won't comment on the present post except to link you to another project in the same space."

> > > Next on HN: "Hello World in 100 languages, in just 2 hour"

> > Hello world is different from solving actual problems in AoC.

> ...

> The AoC isn't the blog post; the choice of using a different language every day is the blog post

This thread started when someone suggested a similar learning project. Would "hello world in 100 languages" be worthy of a blog post?

> Does that not seem even remotely interesting to you?

It is mildly interesting, but in my opinion, not worth a blog post from anyone more experienced than a college student. I think the whole endeavor is silly. I think that learning the syntax of a language well enough to solve one day of AoC is a dubious achievement. You don't learn the language well enough (in my opinion that takes at least several weeks with the language), you don't even get a head start if you were to later start a project in that language, since you saved a few hours at best. The only thing you get, is to brag about it in a blog post. But who are you trying to impress?

> ... Leetcode ..., but the website itself was purpose-built to help people game a broken interview process

I used Leetcode as a generic name, but I don't mean just them. There's lots of platforms that were build around competitive programming, (starting with Topcoder, Codeforces and many others). Everyone is excited about AoC, but very few people spend time on those other platforms for fun.

> AoC is deliberately a game. It's spirited and fun.

Competitive programming problems are just as fun if not more so. Yet not many people here solve these type of problems for fun. Nobody would write the "25 algorithmic problems in 25 days" blog post. In my opinion, most people are excited about AoC because those problems are not too difficult, and anyone can solve a few problems at the start.