These are daily programming puzzles? How long do they take on average?
Also, I know somebody who is just starting out at coding. Would it be too hard for them? They are brand new, learning about loops
Also, I know somebody who is just starting out at coding. Would it be too hard for them? They are brand new, learning about loops
The first few problems are approachable by pretty much anyone who understands how to do arithmetic, file I/O and basic flow control. Many of the later problems require advanced skills such as more sophisticated algorithms (graph theory, dynamic programming, etc.), reverse engineering, and careful debugging.
For what it's worth, I would expect anyone who knows what a loop is to be able to get the first half of today's problem without much difficulty. The second half is a bit less trivial but also pretty easy to understand.
I suspect you'd see a dropoff like this regardless of whether the problems get more difficult or not. Going to the gym doesn't get any harder in February but they see the same effect.
I'd like to see a plot of average (median or mode) to finish each part but only the site has all that information.
I haven't done it since 2017, and I was pretty quick (made that year's overall leaderboard), but on average they took me about 23 minutes (for both parts).
Every day's puzzle has two parts. The first part is usually easy. The second part is then a twist that requires a change to the solution of the first part.
Apart from that, you can always skip a day if you just can't solve it. The exception is that sometimes a puzzle can reference the solution of an older day, so if you'd solved the older day you would already have an understanding of how to proceed, and might be able to reuse some code.
The earlier ones, perhaps, but professional programmers struggle with the later ones. I’d never suggest that some one new to programming tries to do all of AoC.
I'd suggest new programmers do any they can reasonably understand and just skip ones that seem like they'll be frustrating or require a "fast" algorithm they don't know. (OTOH, many days' first star can be gotten with a brute force algorithm. It's usually the 2nd star that takes something more clever.)
First couple of tasks are really easy, but difficulty increases over time and so does time needed to solve them.
Someone who is currently learning about loops might not be able to solve these on their own, but with someone else's help they might learn lots of useful concepts (e.g. linked lists, bfs, basic asm, how to code efficiently...) and try to apply them.
AoC are solving usually those who are quite familiar with programming and want to learn a new language or to compete with colleagues.
In the end I think it's not a good fit, given that basic concepts are still being understood, and the mere task of reading a file and iterating over the lines, even the concept itself of what "iterating" is, is already a big challenge...
Trying is free and won't hurt, though, so why not :)