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Comment by thepuppet33r | Hacker News Reader

I'm such a baby programmer that Advent of Code is still challenging for me, so it's fascinating to see people taking it and exploring all these new languages and platforms. I found (and subsequently lost) someone who had started creating little 8-bit style visualizations from the data outputs.

I do feel like programmers are a bit of a masochistic lot when it comes to AoC, though.

> The logical way to output the solution for the AoC problem is to create sprites for every digit, upload them to video memory, and arrange the sprites on screen. I'm not going to do that and instead I will use Display Mode 2...

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Don't beat yourself up.

This guy - "I do actually know Rust, but I never learned how to use it. I just started writing it because I was born with an innate knowledge of the language, similar to how I know Java or Kotlin despite never having learned them."

My first words were "Dada!". This guys was "public static void main(String[] args)"

There’s a breed of programmers around who just like making things harder for themselves, and are somehow good at it. It’s like being a competitive power lifter or something like that. More weight, more weight, and at some point you get excited by more weight.

You could also compare programming to riding a bicycle - almost anyone can learn how to do that. So, if you want to stand out, you have to ride a unicycle (=Rust) on a tightrope (=the Nintendo DS)...

Not only that, he's also a child prodigy, because (depending of the edition of Rust that was implanted into his brain at birth) he can be at most 12 years old? I am however told that the early versions had little to do with the current version, so having one of those hardwired in your brain would be more of a hindrance than help...

It's more like Rust 2018 was sent back in time 18 years and implanted as latent circuits into my head.

Don't beat yourself up so much, it's challenging to the majority of developers.

The article itself sums things up well "Most of the puzzles are in the realm of either string processing (somewhat applicable to programming), logic puzzles (not really applicable to most programming), or stupid gotchas in the input format (annoyingly, very applicable to most programming)."

The largest challenge is in having enough energy after work to sit down and start coding again.

I really feel this one, it's hard for me to work on personal projects after a long day at work

To be fair, when I look at my private leaderboards the only seriously committed individuals seem to be either 10x devs or unemployed.

Yeah I only ever get started after I've been on holiday for a bit.

Senior developer here, it is challenging. It's designed to be. I'm to the point now though that im a bit burnt out on it. I miss a weekend and then don't have a desire to catch up.

I used to do like 20 days or so in uni, but now I just wish it was in any other month but December - it's just impossible to find the time with all the year-end tasks and ceremonies.

This. December is already a very intense month, and carving out time each day to solve the problems becomes increasingly difficult.

I’ve thought the same in past years but for last year’s aoc I didn’t try to finish all the puzzles in December and let myself work on them whenever I had time throughout the year. It’s a bit less fun because the general zeitgeist isn’t focused on it outside of December but still totally possible to finish them at your own pace.

I want to say - the difference between baby programmer and guy (?) like OP is experience.

I don't directly have experience with hacking on DS, but I had some experience with embedded programming. It first seems daunting and hard, and then you do some stuff and read example code and other code on github and you become "wait that's it?"

What seems hard becomes easy by actually doing it. (that means you need to have time, too, which is another thing)

> I do feel like programmers are a bit of a masochistic lot when it comes to AoC, though.

Maybe. But for some it's really just the enjoyment of a good challenge that lets them explore and try out things. I personally love hardware like the DS simply for its accessibility. Modern PCs and consoles are way too complex, while the DS allows you to poke at its guts with no OS or virtualization in the way. It's fun to approach problems like those in AoC in completely novel ways on systems that require and allow you to do things differently.

It's not for everyone, sure, but it's certainly not torture for those who do it.

The last few days (which more difficult) are still challenging for me, a lot of the difficulty is also just intentionally confusingly described problems I find

There are no AoC problems that are "intentionally confusingly described" and I think the creator would take offense to you saying that.

I didn't know there were AoC sicophants too (I thought only rust had those), let me rephrase it for you "intentionally misleading or vague problem descriptions to add to the challenge" better? Or are still offended by my opinion?

> "intentionally misleading or vague problem descriptions to add to the challenge" better?

No, it's not better. The creator puts a lot of effort and user testing into making the problems as clear and specific as possible, and has given talks on that exact subject. There's absolutely nothing "intentional" about any difficulties you have understanding the problem text. Unfortunately there's only so much that can be done for people who simply can't read.

> Or are [you(?)] still offended by my opinion?

I never said that I was offended, I said that the creator would take offense to your accusation. I'm noticing a pattern here.

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