41–50 of 124 posts
These are daily programming puzzles? How long do they take on average? Also, I know somebody who is just starting out at coding. Would it be too hard for them? They are brand new, learning about loops
For someone just starting out they would get stuck on this very first problem, it involves recursion. People 'get' recursion, but coding it is something different.
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In general the puzzles involve basic operations that any language would have. Functions, data structures, recursion, some amount of back-and-forth between strings and numbers and records. There isn't any reliance on library-like things like making HTTP requests or parsing complex file formats. I think they would be fine for someone starting out at coding. Every day's puzzle has two parts. The first part is usually ea…
> I think they would be fine for someone starting out at coding. The earlier ones, perhaps, but professional programmers struggle with the later ones. I’d never suggest that some one new to programming tries to do all of AoC.
I'd suggest new programmers do any they can reasonably understand and just skip ones that seem like they'll be frustrating or require a "fast" algorithm they don't know. (OTOH, many days' first star can be gotten with a brute force algorithm. It's usually the 2nd star that takes something more clever.)
I was doing a little of catching up on older problems to improve my speed to get on the leaderboard and I found that the fastest way to finish one problem was to use oeis. After seeing the problem [0], I didn't immediately think to use oeis because the manhatten distance of a spiral is pretty easy to code or do by hand. The second stage has a harder sequence though. It prompted me to check oeis and I easily got the a…
Always enjoy doing these but there was one last year that nearly broke me. I think it was day15. It was the worst combination of mind-numbing coding and horribly hard to debug special cases. It was purely convoluted with very little to think about which makes for the worst kind of puzzles
That one wiped me out for a week too, and caused borderline psychological problems. Ultimately though I realised that if I followed the description word by word, and made no assumptions, then I got the right solution. Still, a nightmare: you could pass all the examples, or even some alternate real sample data, and still get it wrong if you got the ordering slightly incorrect.
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Last year I started out using elixir, but I got filtered due to the goblins...
What does this mean?
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For someone just starting out they would get stuck on this very first problem, it involves recursion. People 'get' recursion, but coding it is something different.
It doesn’t need recursion, you can do a while(round(x/3)-2 > 0) type thing, but recursion is simpler.
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What does this mean?
Probably Day 15 [0] from last year. It was challenging, especially because there were so many rules to implement (in a short time). A slight misreading of the rules would let you pass all the provided examples, but fail on the real input. [0] https://adventofcode.com/2018/day/15
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Probably Day 15 [0] from last year. It was challenging, especially because there were so many rules to implement (in a short time). A slight misreading of the rules would let you pass all the provided examples, but fail on the real input. [0] https://adventofcode.com/2018/day/15
Idiot-proofing is hard. Figuring out everything people will get wrong is the only reliable way to ensure people don't, but that takes more insight than is needed to set and solve problems correctly.