Where my Gleamlins at? Who else is using Gleam this year?
Advent of Code 2025
241–250 of 416 posts
Re: Advent of Code 2025
#242> You don't need a computer science background to participate - just a little programming knowledge and some problem solving skills will get you pretty far. Every time I see this I wonder how many amateur/hobbyist programmers it sets up for disappointment. Unless your definition of “pretty far” is “a small number of the part ones”, it’s simply not true.
Someone else in the thread lamented the problems as "too easy" and I wondered what world I was living in.
It's just bluffing, lying. People lie to make others think they're hot shit. It's like the guy in school who gets straight A's and says he never studies. Yeah I'll bet.
Re: Advent of Code 2025
#243Where my Gleamlins at? Who else is using Gleam this year?
I am! I love the design of Gleam in theory but keep bouncing off it so I’m interested in seeing if AoC will help me give it a fair shake.
Re: Advent of Code 2025
#244> You don't need a computer science background to participate - just a little programming knowledge and some problem solving skills will get you pretty far. Every time I see this I wonder how many amateur/hobbyist programmers it sets up for disappointment. Unless your definition of “pretty far” is “a small number of the part ones”, it’s simply not true.
Got to agree. I'm even surprised at just how little progress many of my friends and ex-colleagues over the years make given that they hold down reasonable developer jobs.
My experience has been "little progress" is related to the fact that, while AoC is insanely fun, it always occurs during a time of year when I have the least free time.
Maybe when I was in college (if AoC had existed back then) I could have kept pace, but if part of your life is also running a household, then between wrapping up projects for work, finalizing various commitments I want wrapped up for the year, getting together with family and friends for various celebrations, and finally travel and/or preparing your own house for guests, I'm lucky if I have time to sit down with a cocktail and book the week before Christmas.
Seeing the format changed to 12 days makes me think this might be the first time in years I could seriously consider doing it (to completion).
Re: Advent of Code 2025
#245Advent of Code is one of the highlights of December for me. It's sad, but inevitable, that the global leaderboard had to be pulled. It's also understandable that this year is just 12 days, so takes some pressure off. If you've never done it before, I recommend it. Don't try and "win", just enjoy the problem solving and the whimsy.
And this is how I know I am not a developer/programmer. I have no urge or interest in such event.
I wonder how this is the most straightforward way to know that?
Re: Advent of Code 2025
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
And this is how I know I am not a developer/programmer. I have no urge or interest in such event.
Why post, then? No one cares about your lack of interest.
It always seemed odd to me that a persistent minority of HN readers seem to have no interest in recreational programming/technical problems solving and perpetually ask "why should I care?"
It's totally fine not to care, but I can't quite get why you would then want to be an active member in a community of people who care about this stuff for no other reason than they fundamentally find it interesting.
Re: Advent of Code 2025
#247> You don't need a computer science background to participate - just a little programming knowledge and some problem solving skills will get you pretty far. Every time I see this I wonder how many amateur/hobbyist programmers it sets up for disappointment. Unless your definition of “pretty far” is “a small number of the part ones”, it’s simply not true.
I have a EE background not CS and haven't had too much trouble the last few years. I'm not aiming to be on the global leader board though. I think that with good problem solving skill, you should be able to push through the first 10 days most years. Some years were more front loaded though.
Re: Advent of Code 2025
#248Opinion 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).
For me (and most of my friends/coworkers) the point of AoC was to write in some language that you always wanted to learn but never had the chance. The AoC problems tend to be excellent material for a crash course in a new PL because they cover a range of common programming tasks.
Historically good candidates are:
- Rust (despite it's popularity, I know a lot of devs who haven't had time to play with it).
- Haskell (though today I'd try Lean4)
- Racket/Common Lisp/Other scheme lisp you haven't tried
- Erlang/Elixir (probably my choice this year)
- Prolog
Especially for those langs that people typically dabble in but never get a change to write non-trivial software in (Haskell, Prolog, Racket) AoC is fantastic for really getting a feel for the language.
Re: Advent of Code 2025
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone else in the thread lamented the problems as "too easy" and I wondered what world I was living in.
It's just bluffing, lying. People lie to make others think they're hot shit. It's like the guy in school who gets straight A's and says he never studies. Yeah I'll bet.
They... sort of are though? A year or two ago I just waited until the very last problem, which was min-cut. Anybody with a computer science education who has seen the prompt Proof. before should be able to tackle this one with some effort, guidance, and/or sufficient time. There are algorithms that don't even require all the high-falutin graph theory.
I don't mean to say my solution was good, nor was it performant in any way - it was not, I arrived at adjacency (linked) lists - but the problem is tractable to the well-equipped with sufficient headdesking.
Operative phrase being "a computer science education," as per GGP's point. Easy is relative. Let's not leave the bar on the floor, please, while LLMs are threatening to hoover up all the low hanging fruit.
Re: Advent of Code 2025
#250> You don't need a computer science background to participate - just a little programming knowledge and some problem solving skills will get you pretty far. Every time I see this I wonder how many amateur/hobbyist programmers it sets up for disappointment. Unless your definition of “pretty far” is “a small number of the part ones”, it’s simply not true.
Someone else in the thread lamented the problems as "too easy" and I wondered what world I was living in.
The group of people for which the problems are "too easy" is probably quite small.
According to Eric last year (https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/comments/1hly9dw/2024_...) there were 559 people that had obtained all 500 stars. I'm happy to be one of them.
The actual number is going to be higher as more people will have finished the puzzles since then, and many people may have finished all of the puzzles but split across more than one account.
Then again, I'm sure there's a reasonable number of people who have only completed certain puzzles because they found someone else's code on the AoC subreddit and ran that against their input, or got a huge hint from there without which they'd never solve it on their own. (To be clear, I don't mind the latter as it's just a trigger for someone to learn something they didn't know before, but just running someone else's code is not helping them if they don't dig into it further and understand how/why it works.)
There's definitely a certain specific set of knowledge areas that really helps solve AoC puzzles. It's a combination of classic Comp Sci theory (A*/SAT solvers, Dijkstra's algorithm, breadth/depth first searches, parsing, regex, string processing, data structures, dynamic programming, memoization, etc) and Mathematics (finite fields and modular arithmetic, Chinese Remainder Theorem, geometry, combinatorics, grids and coordinates, graph theory, etc).
Not many people have all those skills to the required level to find the majority of AoC "easy". There's no obvious common path to accruing this particular knowledge set. A traditional Comp Sci background may not provide all of the Mathematics required. A Mathematics background may leave you short on the Comp Sci theory front.
My own experience is unusual. I've got two separate bachelors degrees; one in Comp Sci and one in Mathematics with a 7 year gap between them, those degrees and 25+ years of doing software development as a job means I do find the vast majority of AoC quite easy, but not all of it, there are still some stinkers.
Being able to look at an AoC problem and think "There's some algorithm behind this, what is it?" is hugely helpful.
The "Slam Shuffle" problem (2019 day 22) was a classic example of this that sticks in my mind. The magnitude of the numbers involved in part 2 of that problem made it clear that a naive iteration approach was out of the question, so there had to be a more direct path to the answer.
As I write the code for part 1 of any problem I tend to think "What is the twist for part 2 going to be? How is Eric going to make it orders of magnitude harder?" Sometimes I even guess right, sometimes it's just plain evil.