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Comment by dunefox | Hacker News Reader

I'm torn between F# and Common Lisp (maybe even Raku for one or two puzzles). Julia is my fallback, as always. I think this year I want to solve all puzzles (got to 3/4 last year) and have all of them run in under one second, collectively. A tall order but interesting and fun!

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If you do it in F#, try out VS notebooks: https://www.compositional-it.com/news-blog/a-brief-introduct...

It makes working with the F# REPl very nice. I also had a good experience with F# type providers on consuming external input like AoC's.

I did Common Lisp last year. It was fun and often my solutions were extremely short in terms of LOC, because of how expressive Lisp is.

I got frustrated half way through because most of my time was spent fighting parsing bugs, since AOC tends to give you the data in very inconvenient formats.

Yeah, I did the first week of 2020 with both Lisp and Julia and parsing was indeed an issue; but I'm a Lisp beginner anyway.

Do you have a repo somewhere with the lisp code?

I'm afraid I don't have a repo, sorry. I was working via several different machines and so I kept all the code on my brother's server but he lost the disk encryption keys, kind of a long story.

I just scanned through my 2020 solutions. It seems I used cl-ppcre for almost all my parsing if I couldn't read them directly with the built-in read or read-line functions. On the one occasion I used parseq in 2020 I didn't actually need it (a regex would've done the trick, day 2 password parsing). Parseq is a good option for anything more complex than regexes, though. I'd suggest taking a few days worth of puzzles and writing parsers to get some practice.

https://github.com/mrossini-ethz/parseq/

For the parsing I used a PEG parsing module (of GNU Guile). That made it really safe and precise, but also cost much more time than fumbling around with regex. I am more comfortable with my code being probably correct and for a work problem, I would rather use a grammar and parser than some elaborate regex mess in many cases. So I did the same in AoC. This meant however, that I fell behind. Once that happened, I did not continue for long. Coworkers also stopped a bit earlier. Lets see how far I can go with solving this year's puzzles. Hopefully I can share the joy of collecting stars with anyone I know.

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