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Comment by crispyambulance | Hacker News Reader

The nice thing about math problems is that they're reasonably self-contained. If they didn't focus on toy math problems they would have to do other stuff like endless, increasingly complex form validation, filesystem manipulation, or things like graphics that involve external libraries-- it would just become hard to manage for code-golf scenarios, I think.

What would be a non math-heavy alternative to project euler be like?

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Similar to Project Euler but about bioinformatics I would say http://rosalind.info/problems/locations/

But for learning a specific programming language and confront with other developers, not mentioned yet, there is http://exercism.io/

Edit: also http://www.puzzlenode.com/

> If they didn't focus on toy math problems they would have to do other stuff like endless, increasingly complex form validation, filesystem manipulation, or things like graphics that involve external libraries-- it would just become hard to manage for code-golf scenarios, I think.

It would also make it hard to use the exercises in some languages. For example, awk or retrocomputing languages like JOSS or BLISS.

There's definitely a need to have good little or mid-sized projects which do call for library-wrangling, though. They help get programmers acquainted with the culture surrounding the language, and what kinds of problems other people using the language are solving.

Advent of Code fits this bill nicely. I think 2017's was particularly nice. I didn't go far this year.

Leetcode problems? Hacker rank?

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