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Advent of Code 2022 is nigh

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Re: Advent of Code 2022 is nigh

#131

Post by nikolay »

dagw wrote: post #111
nikolay wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last year when I was doing AoC in Go, I was pleasantly surprised how good Copilot is and it felt like magic. Given most of the time I use Terraform, YAML, JSON, jq, and Bash these days, I can't really appreciate Copilot, but last year I did!

I ended up turning off Copilot last year since it was literally giving me complete correct solutions with no effort on my part. Kind of took the fun out of it.

I can't say it gave me complete solutions, but it really guessed my intent most of the time and saved me typing time so that I could come close to the winners who predominantly use Python.

Re: Advent of Code 2022 is nigh

#132

Post by xboxnolifes »

deathanatos wrote: post #126
burnished wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they are fun! But in an interview environment it can feel like being tested on whether you are cool under pressure and less like you are being assessed for merit.

Parsing a list of list of integers, finding the maximum, in a hour, in the coding environment of your choice: this shouldn't be "under pressure". (We do not ask in interviews questions of the same nature as the last third of AoC. If anything, most of our interview questions are below AoC day 1 in difficulty. And yet they screen absurd numbers of candidates.)

I've never had such a trivial coding challenge before. If that was truly the norm, it would hardly be complained about.

Re: Advent of Code 2022 is nigh

#134

Post by lkuty »

mikewarot wrote: post #78

I'm doing it in Lazarus/Free Pascal again. https://github.com/mikewarot/Advent_of_Code_in_Pascal

You reminded me of Pascal. I used it at school in 1994 (on an IBM RS/6000 I think). I was planning to do the AoC in Shen (I already know Scheme) but you make me want to do it also in Pascal. Thanks for sharing your solutions.

The presence of files with the "lpi" and "lps" extensions means you are using an IDE ? Moreover, I thought the extension for Pascal source code was "pas" but I see "lpr". Why ?

Re: Advent of Code 2022 is nigh

#136

Post by cdaringe »

MrJohz wrote: post #77
jinwoo68 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try Ocaml instead :)

I tried that last year, and got worn down by how often I'd Google how to do something and get an answer explaining how recursion works from first principles as opposed to just pointing at the deciding standard library function that did what I needed. I want to try again this year, do you have any advice for how to get going with Ocaml as someone who has programmed long enough to understand how recursion, linked lists…

I did OCaml the passed two years. GPL productivity in OCaml is easily accessible, but you need opam packages. Its not a deeply batteries-included language at all. With the exception of eio, my goto set of base packages are: https://github.com/cdaringe/protohacks/blob/main/dune-projec...

containers is my preferred “add batteries” std lib extension. Also, the ocaml discord chat and discuss forums are very active and welcome to questions

Re: Advent of Code 2022 is nigh

#137

Post by mikewarot »

lkuty wrote: post #134
mikewarot wrote: post #78

I'm doing it in Lazarus/Free Pascal again. https://github.com/mikewarot/Advent_of_Code_in_Pascal

You reminded me of Pascal. I used it at school in 1994 (on an IBM RS/6000 I think). I was planning to do the AoC in Shen (I already know Scheme) but you make me want to do it also in Pascal. Thanks for sharing your solutions. The presence of files with the "lpi" and "lps" extensions means you are using an IDE ? Moreover, I thought the extension for Pascal source code was "pas" but I see "lpr". Why ?

Lazarus is the GUI IDE based on Free Pascal, and for some reason I think they use LPR to mean Lazarus PRogram.

I could very well be wrong.

Re: Advent of Code 2022 is nigh

#138

Post by burnished »

deathanatos wrote: post #126
burnished wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they are fun! But in an interview environment it can feel like being tested on whether you are cool under pressure and less like you are being assessed for merit.

Parsing a list of list of integers, finding the maximum, in a hour, in the coding environment of your choice: this shouldn't be "under pressure". (We do not ask in interviews questions of the same nature as the last third of AoC. If anything, most of our interview questions are below AoC day 1 in difficulty. And yet they screen absurd numbers of candidates.)

That is more time and an easier problem than I’ve seen, but that’s fine. The point is if you asked some one to tie their shoes while scrutinized they’d probably make a mistake, and the only solution is practice, but that practice is principally not for the purpose of improving your skill but for reducing the impact of being acutely observed.

I don’t think this is a problem per se, I think it’s very egalitarian, but it’s also not difficult to see why people might be uncomfortable or complain.

Re: Advent of Code 2022 is nigh

#139

Post by deathanatos »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #132
deathanatos wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parsing a list of list of integers, finding the maximum, in a hour, in the coding environment of your choice: this shouldn't be "under pressure". (We do not ask in interviews questions of the same nature as the last third of AoC. If anything, most of our interview questions are below AoC day 1 in difficulty. And yet they screen absurd numbers of candidates.)

I've never had such a trivial coding challenge before. If that was truly the norm, it would hardly be complained about.

Then people should be giving examples of questions they're encountering in interviews when they want to discuss why, then; industry norm is not rougher than AoC.

While I've definitely encountered tougher than this AoC in interviews, I find I have a hard time maintaining that bar: I have to push to maintain even the bar of this day's AoC question (e.g., "write min()") as it turns away sufficient number of candidates that hiring managers start looking to lower the bar, which is absurd.

(But that said, when I encounter tougher problems, they're not tougher than about mid-AoC, which is still well within reason, to me. They're still not the infamous sewer lid. Nobody is asking the sewer lid question anymore, and collectively we need to stop propagating that myth. It was banned at Google well over a decade ago…)

(Ultimately, it seems to me to be an economics problem: we're not attracting good devs, which means we're not offering good devs something enticing enough; we're left with the subset for which our offer is enticing, but that isn't what we're looking for. But I can't solve that problem.)

Re: Advent of Code 2022 is nigh

#140

Post by kodwx »

MrJohz wrote: post #77
jinwoo68 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try Ocaml instead :)

I tried that last year, and got worn down by how often I'd Google how to do something and get an answer explaining how recursion works from first principles as opposed to just pointing at the deciding standard library function that did what I needed. I want to try again this year, do you have any advice for how to get going with Ocaml as someone who has programmed long enough to understand how recursion, linked lists…

As a reference, my solutions to advent of code in OCaml (without any external libraries) are here https://github.com/kodwx/advent-of-code
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