This is the first year that I will do AoC. I have never wanted to, but I have a working language of my own now.
https://gavinhoward.com/2024/11/advent-of-code-2024-getting-...
Advent of Code 2024
151–160 of 580 posts
Re: Advent of Code 2024
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
No stars are required at all. You can also skip some days if you don't want to do them. Or only to the first stars. However you like. First/silver stars will also increase your score in the leader boards.
I think you need all stars to do the final puzzle.
I might be mistaken but I believe the final day has only one puzzle, but the 50th star (a.k.a., the second star of December 25th) is given for having solved everything else. I don't think any puzzles are "locked".
Re: Advent of Code 2024
#153Am I alone in thinking that measuring time to get answer is the worst possible metric? I have not participated because of that (yet). If there is a community for those who use other rules to compare actual solutions instead of answers I would be interested to hear about it. I am coming from low level C++ gamedev side so I understand that most people here use different tools to solve different problems.
Here's a website that appears to be about competing on the performance of each solution: https://codspeed.io/advent
Re: Advent of Code 2024
#154> 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. The use of “pretty far” gives them a bit of an out, but I think this statement is a little disingenuous. Last year, at least, a bunch of the problems needed fairly sophisticated algorithms to find the solution in a reasonable amount of time. To me, a little progr…
"Participate" doesn't mean "win". You can look things up as well. I haven't done a ton of AoC, but the harder ones from it I've seen were not very hard to search/research for the correct algorithm (even avoiding "what's the answer for day X" searches).
Re: Advent of Code 2024
#155I can't explain why but doing AoC is always interesting, and doing LeetCode which is supposed to be similar is always very depressing. Wishing everyone a fun challenge. This year I will be practicing F# and hope some of you will give it a try too :) https://github.com/neon-sunset/AOC24/blob/master/day1.fsx
The community is most of the difference. That and the problems aren't very similar to leetcode.
Re: Advent of Code 2024
#156[flagged]
Re: Advent of Code 2024
#157Woohoo! This is my favorite time of the year. As the year rolls into vacation'ish days and on call rotations, this is where I hunker down and use this to code something other than power point. Last year, solved via my primary language (Java), then ported to Rust. This year, I'm starting with Rust. I had not realized it was the first.
Re: Advent of Code 2024
#158Am I alone in thinking that measuring time to get answer is the worst possible metric? I have not participated because of that (yet). If there is a community for those who use other rules to compare actual solutions instead of answers I would be interested to hear about it. I am coming from low level C++ gamedev side so I understand that most people here use different tools to solve different problems.
The vast majority of people are doing it for fun or learning purposes and not to compete on the leaderboard, and it wouldn't quite be fair to compare much else in a competitive setting but time of completion and correctness, since you'd be at a disadvantage just by language choice in many other metrics. Unless you are someone with experience competing in competitive programming you almost certainly won't make the leaderboard anyway.
If your goal is to compare solutions, lots of that happens on the subreddit for it where people post solutions in their language of choice on the daily threads.
I just do it for fun. When I was younger I'd actually do them at release (11pm in my timezone), now I don't even bother and just used them as sort of a brain teaser to start my days and compare with coworkers who also do it, a lot of us in different languages.
Re: Advent of Code 2024
#159I usually do AoC in Common Lisp, but this year I'm giving Swift a chance.
It's not half bad at this kind of twiddling for being a statically typed mainstream language.
https://github.com/codr7/aoc24/tree/main/swift/Sources/aoc
This year is a tiny bit weird, I was just getting ramped up organizing the event at a new job; because I think it's very useful for devs to learn some real problem solving, as opposed to stitching frameworks.
And then I had to leave because my new boss turned out to be someone I couldn't imagine working with.
Guess it'll be just me and Emacs as usual.
Re: Advent of Code 2024
#160I've never done AoC but I've done other programming-related challenges before. I come from a non-IT background (mech eng), and I'm currently away for work for the first several days with only their locked-down laptop. Normally I'd break out Python for this, but given the constraints maybe I should try to see how far I can get through this in Excel. It'd be a fun little challenge :)
My approach here would be to make an index.html file with a script tag and drag it onto whatever browser is available. Then again I have made peace with JavaScript! (I think you could even use typescript with this method with the on the fly babel transpiler (you just include a script tag) but I haven't tried that.)
You'll lose the benefit of the TypeScript compiler picking up mismatched types if you only use a transpiler.