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Comment by staticelf | Hacker News Reader

So, what are people gonna work in? Anything interesting? I am myself thinking about doing the challanges in Powershell. Because why not suffer more on this earth.

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I'm thinking on doing them in Rust and Clojure. I've dabbled in Clojure before but nothing serious and I'd like to build up some more familiarity. Rust because it's the first systems programming language that grabbed my attention; plus it's always good to have a varied selection of tools in your proverbial toolbox.

I know that I can probably do them in 10 minutes in Python, but that's not going to be as fun or valuable, especially since I'm not going to be able to compete for the leaderboard due to timezone/work.

> I know that I can probably do them in 10 minutes in Python

Then you are in the absolute top tier of the people competing. Either that, or you probably belong in this subreddit https://reddit.com/r/iamverysmart ;)

Haha, I meant the actual coding part. I'm sure the problem solving would take me longer, it's just that once I have a solution in mind I can code it in 10 minutes in Python, since I'm very familiar with it and use it almost on a daily basis.

Having to think about basic things such as how to instantiate hash maps, what is the syntax for control flow, does this language have this particular functionality. This can take hours spent in reading documentation and debugging.

From what I've seen from last year, the problems arent't that hard (they're meant to be solved within a day), so the real time consuming part is the coding.

I get what you mean, but after the few first days it gets kinda hard imo. It takes like 10 minutes for me to read and maybe grep what the problem is.

> Anything interesting?

Couple months ago I discovered Nim [1], which I find as an interesting language, and I just finished 2015's tasks as a practice [2].

Now I'm considering using it for this year too. I'll use Python as a fallback, if/when I fail to complete some task in Nim.

[1] https://nim-lang.org/

[2] https://github.com/narimiran/advent_of_code_2015

Moving from Python 2 to Python 3. I sort of debated learning something new, like Haskell. But I want to be competitive, and that means language familiarity.

I'm challenging myself to use a different language every day. But I've already blown too many good languages; need to save some for the end (assuming the problems get harder).

Powershell seems fitting. Advent is a penitential season after all.

I'm trying racket.

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