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I agree. Didn't these puzzles ruin interviewing for many years now. AI came along and they're still doing it. Some things will needlessly drag on before they die I guess
How do they ruin interviewing? The whole point of these puzzles is that they’re meant to be fun to solve, not a means to an end, but enjoyable for what they are.
Opinion poll: Python is extremely suitable for these kind of problems. C++ is also often used, especially by competitive programmers. Which "non-mainstream" or even obscure languages are also well suited for AoC? Please list your weapon of choice and a short statement why it's well suited (not why you like it, why it's good for AoC).
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I’ve been doing them is JS and Common Lisp. I recommend the problems to help learning new languages.
I respect the effort going into making Advent of Code but with the very heavy emphasis on string parsing, I'm not convinced it's a good way to learn most languages. Most problems are 80%-90% massaging the input with a little data modeling which you might have to rethink for the second part and algorithms used to play a significant role only in the last few days. That heavily favours languages which make manipulating…
I know people who make some arbitrary extra restriction, like “no library at all” which can help to learn the basics of a language.
The downside I see is that suddenly you are solving algorithmic problems, which some times are bot trivial, and at the same time struggling with a new language.
Opinion poll: Python is extremely suitable for these kind of problems. C++ is also often used, especially by competitive programmers. Which "non-mainstream" or even obscure languages are also well suited for AoC? Please list your weapon of choice and a short statement why it's well suited (not why you like it, why it's good for AoC).
I like to use Haskell, because parser combinators usually make the input parsing aspect of the puzzles extremely straightforward. In addition, the focus of the language on laziness and recursion can lead to some very concise yet idiomatic solutions. Example: find the first example for when this "game of life" variant has more than 1000 cells in the "alive" state. Solution: generate infinite list of all states and ite…
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That’s also completely true and something I often say about gaming. You don’t like achievements? Just don’t do them. Your enjoyment shouldn’t be a function of how others interact with the product.
"Just ignore it" doesn't work, psychologically.
Opinion poll: Python is extremely suitable for these kind of problems. C++ is also often used, especially by competitive programmers. Which "non-mainstream" or even obscure languages are also well suited for AoC? Please list your weapon of choice and a short statement why it's well suited (not why you like it, why it's good for AoC).
I'm actually pleasantly surprised to see a 2025 edition, last year being the 10th anniversary and the LLM situation with the leaderboard were solid indications that it would have been a great time to wrap it up and let somebody else carry the torch. It's only going to be 12 problems rather than 24 this year and there isn't going to be a gloabl leaderboard, but I'm still glad we get to take part in this fun Christmas…
I did a post [0] about this last year, and vanilla LLMs didn’t do nearly as well as I’d expected on advent of code, though I’d be curious to try this again with Claude code and codex [0] https://www.jerpint.io/blog/2024-12-30-advent-of-code-llms/
The difference when working on larger tasks that require reasoning is night and day.
In theory it would be very interesting to go back and retry the 2024 tasks, but those will likely have ended up in the training data by now...
Opinion poll: Python is extremely suitable for these kind of problems. C++ is also often used, especially by competitive programmers. Which "non-mainstream" or even obscure languages are also well suited for AoC? Please list your weapon of choice and a short statement why it's well suited (not why you like it, why it's good for AoC).
Kotlin, because it’s a language I like
Opinion poll: Python is extremely suitable for these kind of problems. C++ is also often used, especially by competitive programmers. Which "non-mainstream" or even obscure languages are also well suited for AoC? Please list your weapon of choice and a short statement why it's well suited (not why you like it, why it's good for AoC).
I write most as pure functional/immutable code unless a problem calls for speed. And with extension functions I've made over the years and a small library (like 2d vectors or grid utils) it's quite nice to work with. Like, if I have a 2D list (List>), and my 2d vec, like a = IntVec(5,3), I can do myList[a] and get the element due to an operator overload extension on list-lists.
and with my own utils and extension functions added over years of competitive programming (like it's very fluent