Re: Advent of Code

[John Perry <john.perry@usm.edu>]

On Monday, December 14, 2020 at 1:51:28 PM UTC-6, Stephen Leake wrote:
> I won't be doing any more Advent of Code puzzles; I'd rather spend the 
> time working on incremental parse in Emacs ada-mode. 

What follows is a long way of saying "Thank you." :-)

I spend about 2 hours on each puzzle, which probably doesn't speak well of my programming prowess (I've programmed for decades, so I can't really say it's because I'm learning Ada). Somehow I enjoy it enough to come back day after day.

The puzzles themselves are usually easy (to me), and most of the ones with a non-trivial solution can probably be solved trivially, with one exception. At least the mathematics has gotten a little more sophisticated; I used the Chinese Remainder Theorem recently, which I got a kick out of implementing in Ada as a one-line function (not including a support function to compute a modular inverse). I noticed that Maxim used Fermat's Little Theorem.

I sometimes roll my eyes at the puzzles, but the one thing I've really enjoyed so far is how each new puzzle has nudge me to learn a different Ada feature with each new puzzle. I'd spend a lot less time on it if I allowed myself to use a computer algebra system, but the point is to learn Ada, and the really nice surprise has been how people have helped out, some of them even commenting directly on GitHub.