Would love to know which exotic and niche languages are people going to use for this year. I am personally thinking of trying out Crystal or Elixir
I’m probably going to use rescript. Though I may do Gleam or Roc.
Advent of Code 2025
151–160 of 416 posts
Re: Advent of Code 2025
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am so glad there is no leaderboard this year. Making it a competition really is against the spirit of advent calendars in general. It’s also not a fair competition by default simply due to the issue of time zones and people’s life schedules not revolving around it. There are plenty of programming competitions and hackathons out there. Let this one simply be a celebration of learning and the enjoyment of problem sol…
I agree with the first point but the second point feels irrelevant. Yeah, people's life schedules don't revolve around it, but that doesn't mean shouldn't make iy a competition. Most people who play on chess.com don't have lives that revolve around it, but that doesn't mean that chess.com should abolish Elo rankings.
The global leaderboard encouraged bad behavior against the entire project. Including criminal things like attempting to ddos the site.
Re: Advent of Code 2025
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man, those people using LLMs in competitive programming ... where's the fun in that? I don't get people for whom it's just about winning, I wish everyone would just have some basic form of dignity and respect.
> I don't get people for whom it's just about winning, I wish everyone would just have some basic form of dignity and respect. reminds me of something I read in "I’m a high schooler. AI is demolishing my education." [0,1] emphasis added: > During my sophomore year, I participated in my school’s debate team. I was excited to have a space outside the classroom where creativity, critical thinking, and intellectual rigor…
> high school debate used to be an extracurricular thing students could do for fun.
High school debate has been ruthless for a long time, even before AI. There has been a rise in the use of techniques designed to abuse the rules and derail arguments for several years. In some regions, debates have become more about teams leveraging the rules and technicalities against their opponents than organically trying to debate a subject.
Re: Advent of Code 2025
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man, those people using LLMs in competitive programming ... where's the fun in that? I don't get people for whom it's just about winning, I wish everyone would just have some basic form of dignity and respect.
Weirdly I feel lot more accepting of LLMs in this type of environment than in making actual products. Point is doing things fast and correct enough. So in someways LLM is just one more tool. With products I want actual correctness. And not something thrown away.
The goal of "actual projects" is also fast and correct enough though
Re: Advent of Code 2025
#155I _love_ the Advent of Code. I actually (selfishly) love that it's only 12 days this year, because by about half way, I'm struggling to find the time to sit down and do the fantastic problems because of all the holiday activities IRL. Huge thanks to those involved!
Yeah, last year I only got to Day7 (on dec 26). I hope the smaller amount reduces "the fear of falling behind".
Re: Advent of Code 2025
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man, those people using LLMs in competitive programming ... where's the fun in that? I don't get people for whom it's just about winning, I wish everyone would just have some basic form of dignity and respect.
Weirdly I feel lot more accepting of LLMs in this type of environment than in making actual products. Point is doing things fast and correct enough. So in someways LLM is just one more tool. With products I want actual correctness. And not something thrown away.
These contests are about memorizing common patterns and banging out code quickly. Outsourcing that to an LLM defeats the point. You can say it's a stupid contest format, and that's fine.
(I did a couple of these in college, though we didn't practice outside of competition so we weren't especially good at it.)
Re: Advent of Code 2025
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't get people for whom it's just about winning, I wish everyone would just have some basic form of dignity and respect. reminds me of something I read in "I’m a high schooler. AI is demolishing my education." [0,1] emphasis added: > During my sophomore year, I participated in my school’s debate team. I was excited to have a space outside the classroom where creativity, critical thinking, and intellectual rigor…
> high school debate used to be an extracurricular thing students could do for fun. High school debate has been ruthless for a long time, even before AI. There has been a rise in the use of techniques designed to abuse the rules and derail arguments for several years. In some regions, debates have become more about teams leveraging the rules and technicalities against their opponents than organically trying to debate…
It sucks that the fun is being sucked out of debate, but I guess a silver lining is that the abuse of these tactics helps everyone understand that winning debates isn't about being correct, it's about being a good debater. And a similar principle can be applied to the application of law and public policy as well.
Re: Advent of Code 2025
#158I _love_ the Advent of Code. I actually (selfishly) love that it's only 12 days this year, because by about half way, I'm struggling to find the time to sit down and do the fantastic problems because of all the holiday activities IRL. Huge thanks to those involved!
I agree so much. Maybe I'll finally get a year done!
Re: Advent of Code 2025
#159Opinion 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 think Crystal, Nim, Julia and F# were my favorites from last year's AoC
I wrote a bit more about it here https://laszlo.nu/blog/advent-of-code-2024.html
AoC is a great opportunity for exploring languages!
Re: Advent of Code 2025
#160Opinion 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).
Another vote for Haskell. It’s fun and the parsing bit is easy. I do struggle with some of the 2d map style questions which are simpler in a mutable 2d array in c++. It’s sometimes hard to write throwaway code in Haskell!