Ask HN (comment edition): I know we have plenty of people here doing AoC with their own personal challenges/restrictions on top. What are yours? Solving in an eso-lang? Self-imposed resource constraints (runtime/memory)? Only using Excel? Let's hear 'em.
I'm trying to fully vectorize the first few days with RVV.
The first day started of quite challanging with number parsing, sorting and set intersection.
I may have gotten sidetracked trying to beat the standard library sort for a week.
It's already half way into week three and I'm still at day 2 part 2.
Fun read! I just missed doing professional gamedev on the DS/DSi (made a few for 3DS), but we still had a Nitro devkit or two in the office. But my experience is of course very different since we both used C++ and had all the official docs and kits. So it's fun to see people reverse engineering it.
There was definitely something fun with making games for these very specialized and unique consoles. While it's natural and a whole lot easier to dev now that all consoles (and PCs) have converged to being almost identical, I can't help but feel a bit nostalgic for it.
I'm such a baby programmer that Advent of Code is still challenging for me, so it's fascinating to see people taking it and exploring all these new languages and platforms. I found (and subsequently lost) someone who had started creating little 8-bit style visualizations from the data outputs. I do feel like programmers are a bit of a masochistic lot when it comes to AoC, though. > The logical way to output the solut…
Don't beat yourself up so much, it's challenging to the majority of developers. The article itself sums things up well "Most of the puzzles are in the realm of either string processing (somewhat applicable to programming), logic puzzles (not really applicable to most programming), or stupid gotchas in the input format (annoyingly, very applicable to most programming)."
The largest challenge is in having enough energy after work to sit down and start coding again.
I'm such a baby programmer that Advent of Code is still challenging for me, so it's fascinating to see people taking it and exploring all these new languages and platforms. I found (and subsequently lost) someone who had started creating little 8-bit style visualizations from the data outputs. I do feel like programmers are a bit of a masochistic lot when it comes to AoC, though. > The logical way to output the solut…
Don't beat yourself up. This guy - "I do actually know Rust, but I never learned how to use it. I just started writing it because I was born with an innate knowledge of the language, similar to how I know Java or Kotlin despite never having learned them." My first words were "Dada!". This guys was "public static void main(String[] args)"
Not only that, he's also a child prodigy, because (depending of the edition of Rust that was implanted into his brain at birth) he can be at most 12 years old? I am however told that the early versions had little to do with the current version, so having one of those hardwired in your brain would be more of a hindrance than help...
Don't beat yourself up. This guy - "I do actually know Rust, but I never learned how to use it. I just started writing it because I was born with an innate knowledge of the language, similar to how I know Java or Kotlin despite never having learned them." My first words were "Dada!". This guys was "public static void main(String[] args)"
Not only that, he's also a child prodigy, because (depending of the edition of Rust that was implanted into his brain at birth) he can be at most 12 years old? I am however told that the early versions had little to do with the current version, so having one of those hardwired in your brain would be more of a hindrance than help...
It's more like Rust 2018 was sent back in time 18 years and implanted as latent circuits into my head.
This is my first advent of code, my initial goal was solving the challenges using APL (note: I've never used that kind of language). It didn't work. :D I continued in C++, but kind of lost interest. Next year I'll learn the language beforehand. hehe
I struggled with APL last year. This year I’ve been enjoying trying to solve the problems in uiua (“wee-wha”). It’s a symbol-based array language like APL, with a wonderful online editor and code formatter (also command line), that formats on each run, and lets you type in English keywords that it converts into symbols, so you don’t have to hunt and peck through the virtual keyboard or remember a bunch of arbitrary c…
Thank you for the hint, I didn't know Uiua. I'll definitely take a look on it.
Senior developer here, it is challenging. It's designed to be. I'm to the point now though that im a bit burnt out on it. I miss a weekend and then don't have a desire to catch up.
I used to do like 20 days or so in uni, but now I just wish it was in any other month but December - it's just impossible to find the time with all the year-end tasks and ceremonies.
I’ve thought the same in past years but for last year’s aoc I didn’t try to finish all the puzzles in December and let myself work on them whenever I had time throughout the year. It’s a bit less fun because the general zeitgeist isn’t focused on it outside of December but still totally possible to finish them at your own pace.
Whether it's boring and whether it's a waste of time are both pretty subjective. I found it to be an engaging way to shake off some rust, though admittedly I'm not going to make it through the whole month.