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Advent of Code 2025

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Re: Advent of Code 2025

#351

Post by joseda-hg »

duxup wrote: post #285
deergomoo wrote: post #225

> 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.

On sorta the same topic: In the programming world I feel like there's a lot of info "for beginners" and a lot of folks / activities for experts. But that middle ground world is strange... a lot of it is a combo of filling in "basics" and also touching more advanced topics at the same time and the amount of content and just activities filling that in seems very low. I get it though, the middle ground skilled audience…

It's one of the worst parts of being self taught, beginner level stuff has a large interest base because everyone can get into it.

Advanced level stuff usually gets recommended directly by experts or will be interesting to beginners too as a way of seeing the high level.

Mid level stuff doesn't have that wide appeal, the freshness in the mind of the experts, or the ease of getting into, so it's not usually worth it for creators if the main metric is reach/interest

Structured (taught) learning is better in this regard, it at least gives you structure to cling on to at the mid level

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#352

Post by rootnod3 »

tmtvl wrote: post #169
rootnod3 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal choice is always Common Lisp. Absolute swiss army knife.

With both AoC and Project Euler I like seeing how fast I can get my solution to run with SBCL. Finding all palindromic primes below a million in less than a second is pretty neat.

SBCL is an absolute beast. I think only surpassed by LispWorks, but SBCL is a miracle machine. Even without type annotations it usually performs well enough.

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#353

Post by zozbot234 »

fragmede wrote: post #309
SilverSlash wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Rust still "non-mainstream"? Because it's extremely well suited for AoC. The ergonomics of a high-level language with the performance of C++.

> The ergonomics of a high-level language Is there a way to drop into a repl like with python and pdb.set_trace()? I couldn't find one last time I played around with Rust.

https://github.com/evcxr/evcxr (evcxr is short for "evaluation context and REPL")

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#355

Post by coolThingsFirst »

doublerabbit wrote: post #190
PaulRobinson wrote: post #14

Advent 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.

It's all marketing, I can sell this to you and convert you.

Thing is it may have some interesting challenges, I too, wouldn't want to solve some insane string parsing problem with no interesting idea behind it. For today's problem, I did the naive version and it worked. The modular version created some issues with some corner cases.

There should be more events like AoC. Self-contained problems are very educational.

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#356

Post by Ntrails »

eichin wrote: post #223
f1shy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While is „only“ 12 days, are like 24 challenges. As no leaderboard is there, and I do it for fun, i will do it in 24 days.

That sounds healthy! But I would note that there's been interesting community discussions on reddit in past years, and I've gotten caught up in the "finish faster so I can go join the reddit discussion without spoilers". It turns out you can have amazing in-jokes about software puzzles and ascii art - but it also taught me in a very visceral way that even for "little" problems, building a visualizer (or making sure y…

Last year was the first time I ever did the thing in sync, and it was a source of real delight to see other people foot-gunning themselves in the same way as me (also in different ways, schadenfreude and all that....)

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#357

Post by thedavibob »

eshse wrote: post #292
noirscape wrote: post #69

Taking out the public leaderboard makes sense imo. Even when you don't consider the LLM problem, the public Leaderboard's design was never really suited for anyone outside of the very specific short list of (US) timezones where competing for a quick solution was every feasible. One thing I do think would be interesting is to see solution rate per hour block . It'd give an indication of how popular advent of code is a…

I live in Sweden nowadays (UTC+1) and it starts at 6am so last year I woke up at 5:30, grabbed a coffee, and gave it a go. Got nowhere near the leaderboard times so gave up after four days!

Yes: I'd argue that the timings actually work/worked better for Western Europe than the USA, I personally preferred doing the puzzle at 5am (UK) than the midnight equivalent, as I could finish before work (on a good day).

Nearly scratched a decent ranking once only, top 300 or so.

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#359

Post by alexfoo »

saberience wrote: post #347
deergomoo wrote: post #225

> 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.

Agreed. There is no "beginner" or amateur programmer who could complete even part of a single Advent of Code problem.

I disagree, the odd few are quite simple and can be done with pencil and paper.

https://adventofcode.com/2020/day/1 for example. It's not hard to do part 1 by hand.

You need two numbers from the input list (of 200 numbers) that add to 2020.

For each number n in the list you just have to check if (2020-n) is in the list.

A quick visual scan showed my input only had 9 numbers that were less than 1010, so I'd only have to consider 9 candidate numbers.

It would also be trivial for anyone who can do relatively simple things with a spreadsheet.

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#360

Post by thomasjb »

fainpul wrote: post #20

Opinion 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).

C, because it makes every problem into a memory management problem, which is good for you in an 'eat your vegetables' sort of way. It's also the starting point for a lot of other programming languages and related things like HDLs, which is helpful to me.

I'm plodding my way through the 2015 challenge here: https://git.thomasballantine.com/thomasballantine/Advent_of_... , it's really sharpened me up on a number of points.

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