Advent of Code 2019

Maybe Raku would also be a nice language to try things out :-) https://raku.org

Thanks for linking that, very enjoyable.

Outside of family, work, and exercise, I have time and energy for approximately one personal project.

AoC got to be a bit of a grind for me last year. Something came up, and I missed a few days towards the end. I told myself I was going to go back and finish, but I never did.

I'm tempted to try again this year, but I don't know. I already have projects languishing in need of some attention. On the other hand, it's lots of fun.

I think I made it to day 6 last year. But not Past the second challenge. I unfortunately have just a little too much going on to tackle it everyday. Maybe this year will be different.

You're presented with a pretty unique, bite-size programming challenge every day. Everything is themed around Christmas so there's a short story about how you have to help Santa's elves fix their machinery or something like that.

Different people get slightly different problems, so you have to do your own work to solve for your puzzle input. You feed it back into the site to see if it was correct or not. Getting a problem right was a great feeling, and it progressively unlocks more of a Christmas-themed ASCII art picture.

I would have a tough time explaining it to someone who doesn't do any programming, but it's free to try if you're curious!

It’s a neatly polished programming challenge site which is both communal and competitive, there’s a bonus score (I think) for completing on the same day a challenge is released, there’s a leaderboard race for the first 100 answers each day (typically all gone within 1-2 minutes after midnight) and there’s a subreddit where people share their solutions in all kinds of languages, and it’s nothing to do with competing for a FAANG job interview.

But apart from that it is “just” coding challenges with a story wrapped around them, and if you don’t like those, you won’t care for it.

It's fun.

In my opinion, the thing that makes these puzzles different from bog-standard code challenge sites is simple, but profound: 'the twist'.

Each day's puzzle is not one, but two-fold. You first solve the problem you're given, and then the second half is unlocked. /This second half usually incorporates some sort of twist./ That means that you may have to rethink your program, generalize it, find some missing optimization or think your way around the problem as it's given, etc.

In some ways, it feels like what you have to do to a real program: You write what you think is a perfect solution, then discover you need to model the problem more deeply, or refactor it all, or scrap it and start over. It's a flavor of 'puzzle realism' that makes each day a bite-size nugget of a challenge that's genuinely fun to work out.

problems are quite interesting (after initial days, those are usually trivial)

e.g. once in 2017 you had problem1: implement an interpreter for this asm-like language. ok, 5 instructions, super easy. ...problem2, run this asm-like program. You couldn't, it was 10^n iterations, would take days. You had to read, understand and optimize the asm-like code.

last year I was amazed writing a function to check if two rectangles intersect (you can do it in like 2 lines)

so, TLDR, you get a lot of "hey that's cool! I never thought about it"

I'm beginner programmer and even the early puzzles seem very hard, but after some thought you get correct answers and then you can check from youtube how real programmers do it.

You have to have an account but you don’t have to use a nick or name.

I wouldn't get your hopes up.

You can login with Reddit or with Github, and Reddit doesn't need an email address, so if you can make a HN account here to rant with, you can make an account for AoC ??

Mandatory signups on the internet, especially for tools that don't require them, are dangerous. They feel like deliberate or accidental honeypots, trying to get people's passwords. As members of the industry who have seen the problems that thrive from this practice, we should be opposed to them.

The number of things you need a membership for a extremely limited. Can you imagine if you went to your local supermarket to buy milk, and they said "I'm sorry, you can't buy milk without a membership".

Surely this is one of those cases when a signup is not necessary. Anyone who asks for personal data they do not genuinely require should not be trusted.

> Just use a cookie or something.

Someone downloads their input, clears their cookies before submitting solution & then their solution is "wrong" because they're using an outdated input.

Seems like tying you to something more persistent i.e. a google/twitter/reddit/github acocunt is a more reliable strategy

You weren't prevented from anything. You're just really stubborn.

As an alternative to the suggestions, some repositories include the inputs along with the problem descriptions.

This one has a fair bit: https://gitlab.com/BafDyce/adventofcode

Verifying your answer will be tricky though, since you won't know if someone else's code is correct for your input unless you find a repo that also includes the verified result.

Some knives needs more sharpening than others before they get useful.

For instance, coming from mostly TS/C# I'm not going to be productive in Rust over night.

24 exercises sounds about right to me.

> I'm not competing, partly because I don't want to be up at 6AM, and partly because I like it better as a relaxed 15-30 minutes where I learn some new stuff about the environment I'm working with (for example, one year I used CMake to build, just to get some experience with it).

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but this doesn't seem very exceptional. To me this seems to be 100% within the spirit of the project.

I didn't even know there were competitive aspects in place.

I think the "competition" part stands out because of the nature of competition. But practically it's a supplement for the people who want that. I'm going to wildly guess that the overwhelming majority of participants aren't seriously competing.

I absolutely love and share your approach. Learn new stuff and grow.

This reminds me of SpaceChem, Magnum Opus, or other games like that. I get a solution and then I optimize the solution and explore other methods of getting there.

You can do that with the standard library, just do File::read_to_string and String::lines or String::split_whitespace.

I tried using it to learn Haskell last year. Warning: it gets hard, and you will want to concentrate on the problem solving, not on compiler errors. It definitely helped my Haskell for the first week or two, but then I switched to Python. I like Rust and recently learned it, but honestly doing AoC in it while learning sounds really painful.

I tried AoC in Rust two years ago, and you really don't need anything beyond the excellent standard library. Rust has lots of nice features that make working with the type of input AoC gives trivial.

By limiting yourself to the standard library at first, I find that you can get a good feel for the language itself.

You could look up some of the published solutions from last year to get a feel for what is possible.

Example: https://github.com/bertptrs/adventofcode/tree/master/2018/sr...

This person kept a minimal common library for recurring functionality and a small wrapper application that launches the code for each puzzle. It looks like a really clean approach.

I did part of last year in rust and found that indeed iterating over lines and splits worked quite well.

Also had a good learning experience using the nom parser combinator package [0], but this takes a bit of code (that you can often reuse between days).

If you are aiming for fast solutions, the !scan macro of serde-scan [1] is made for exactly this, but then you are far outside the core language...

[0]: https://crates.io/crates/nom [1]: https://docs.rs/serde_scan/0.3.2/serde_scan/macro.scan.html

> This year I really want to try to use this to learn Rust. Are there any good practices or crates to handle file input like most of the problems give?

Last year I asked the same, and I found this answer on SO:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31046763/does-rust-have-...

See the answer which mentions the "text_io" crete.

Last year I attempted it during a comically short time (only 3 days), but was able to settle on something like this: https://github.com/j1elo/advent-of-code-2018-rust/blob/maste...

i.e. pass the input from standard input, and just build an on-the-go Vector of some data type that is appropriate for the problem at hand. Day 3 was different from 1 and 2 in that for the first time the parsing was not immediate; using Serde and Recap modules did a fantastically succinct job of parsing the text input. Of course it depends on how much you want to rely on external crates.

Let's see if this year I can do more than 3 days worth of AoC :-)

I've been doing the last few years in Clojure (mostly to keep my knowledge of the corelib and the functional paradigm fresh until I can use it in a project). It helps in some problems, and hurts in others - sometimes an imperative, mutable approach is simply the only practical way, and I've fallen back to Java once or twice to do so.

For the simulation-style challenges, I've found the language to be an absolute pleasure, giving some truly lovely code; I'm fairly sure you could make similarly lovely OO code as well, but my tastes find the functional expression of the simulation extremely attractive. Some debugging certainly does get easier, in my opinion.

I've used it to play with a different language each year, I find the puzzles perfect for that.

This year though, I'm not even starting until January! I find I get completely obsessed with trying to complete them and it can ruin December for (the people around) me ;)

Looking forward to January 1st though :D

Last year I did "Advent of Elixir" at my company with the puzzles from AoC. It was slow paced but I got some people excited about Elixir! I also followed José Valim on Twitch to see how he tackled those.

If you want to stay competitive, you've got to invest some time right before Christmas, so I gave up on that pretty quickly. Instead I did the puzzles at my on pace and spent some extra time playing with the puzzles that I found especially fun:

https://twitter.com/StefanChrobot/status/1080574491535781899

https://twitter.com/StefanChrobot/status/1078448111041892352

As a bonus, you get something to show whenever you're asked to share some code when applying for a job!

And then there's the learning factor - the puzzles are progressively more difficult, but I guess still doable for the average programmer. At some point some of them start to feel repetitive, but that's great if you get a good hold on processing data in your language of choice.

I don't get to code much in the day job, so having a bite-sized puzzle is great entertainment.

For me it was the ideal way to wade into the rust waters last year, and quickly find out it (rust) was not my cup of tea, at least not at the time. This year I will try to follow along in zig, and see where that takes me.

Mainly high score hunting in Python 3, which is my fastest language. But I also plan to then do every challenge in Perl, which I want to start learning for professional reasons.

This will be my first year. Can you explain what your toolkit is? I don’t have anything prepared and if people are going in with a toolkit it seems like I might not be prepared?