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Comment by harco | Hacker News Reader

What are you guys "using" the AoC for? Highscore hunting in your most favorite environment? Learning something new, or unusual?

For me, this year, I'll give it another try to get into rust a bit more. Or maybe finally golang, after all these years of enterprisey java.

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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.

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.

Do the problems require familiarity with say more serious algorithmic techniques such as graphs?

In general - no. Not in order to solve the problem. But participants familiar with such techniques will often recognize a pattern in a given problem and provide an elegant solution.

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

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.

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

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