Show HN: PyBites Code Challenges

If anyone is interested in something for comparison, here's what it would look like in k6 (http://kparc.com):

    v: 1 2 3 4 5 8 10
    l: "|"\"eaoinrtlsu|dg|bcmp|fhvwy|k|jx|qz"
    d: !/+,/l,\:'v
    t@*>(+/d@_:)'t:0:"dictionary.txt"

First three lines are constructing the dictionary the template in this problem hands to you, and the last line loads the file and finds the item with the maximum scrabble dictionary score.

This would be the readable perl5 solution:

    my %scrabble_scores = (
       1 => [qw( E A O I N R T L S U )], 
       2 => [qw( D G )],
       3 => [qw( B C M P )],
       4 => [qw( F H V W Y )],
       5 => [qw( K )],
       8 => [qw( J X )],
      10 => [qw( Q Z )]);
    my $dict = "/usr/share/dict/words";
    open my $d, "<", $dict or die "$dict: $!";
    
    keys my %a = 26; # ranked alphabet
    for my $rank (keys %scrabble_scores) {
      for my $letter (@{$scrabble_scores{$rank}}) {
        $a{$letter} = $rank;
      }
    }
    
    my @maxscore = ('' => 0);
    while (<$d>) {
      my $score = 0;
      chomp;
      for my $c (split//) {
        $score += $a{uc($c)};
      }
      @maxscore = ($_ => $score) if $score > $maxscore[1];
    }
    print "$maxscore[0] => $maxscore[1]\n";

Arguable more readable than python

I don't like the solution template they propose because it will likely stall users from creativly solving the problem. I also don't think this is an idomatic solution to the problem in a pythonic way.

You're going from file->list->for loop when you can just go file->for loop.

See also http://www.pythonchallenge.com

(Though it's more about solving puzzles than what this code challenge seems to be aiming for.)

I think I'll enjoy doing this. As a teacher with less free time, these tasks seem short and will keep my brain "puzzling" over code without the stress of a high priority project looming in the background.

So far I've got a time of around 1 second on the first challenge. It's nice to be able to practice my profiling and see how low I can get it!

Thanks for all your inputs, we just published our 2nd challenge: http://pybit.es/codechallenge02.html