advent-of-code-jq VS too-many-lists

If you just want a series of programming puzzles, check out the Advent of Code[1]

[1] https://adventofcode.com/

This goes against Agile, against what many have only known. You can try it, and see what happens. Try a challenge from AdventOfCode, spend a couple of days working up a plan first. Did you write a cleaner solution? Now extrapolate.

I have used BFS only sporadically to solve problems at work. DFS was usually a simpler or better choice. BFS is, however, an essential tool for Advent of Code puzzles - each year, BFS is sufficient to solve at least a few puzzles. BFS is also a very common algorithm for coding interviews.

I'm staring to be a huge fan of the Advent of Code challenge every beginning of December. Everyday puzzle is a great excuse to talk to people of your company that probably you don't interact much otherwise. And /r/adventofcode subreddit fan-arts and community is fun to follow. I always entered after completing the daily challenge, otherwise it may be a huge spoil :D

Advent of Code (https://adventofcode.com/)

It's not a programming course per-se, but it's a great resource to master the skill of coding and problem solving.

It's just one part though, it won't teach you anything about architecturing a bigger system.

For anyone currently looking for something that does this for you, may I suggest Advent of Code: https://adventofcode.com/ This is the first year I've really had time and space to enjoy it, and enjoy it I have.

Also - this article ends on such a weird note given the message that the rest of it delivers. The author has finally realized how valuable it is to have something that gets them going, regardless of whether or not it ends up being "useful", but then immediately stumbles over the fear of it not lasting and failing to achieve greatness in it and sharply concludes with that sentiment.

Perseverance through intermediate-ness into greatness is irrelevant to enjoyment.

Hanukkah of Data is a series of data-themed puzzles, where you solve puzzles to move your way through a holiday-themed story using a fictional dataset. I think of it as "Advent of Code meets SQL Murder Mystery".

This journey will transform you and challenge your creative and resourceful thinking. You will explore new possibilities with VIM, going beyond what you thought it could do. And as you advance through the Advent Of Code puzzles, you will truly transform yourself if you follow the two scenarios listed below.

I've been making a CLI for advent of code ( https://adventofcode.com/ ) this week: https://github.com/VitamintK/wang-aoc-cli

It's been satisfying!

December started 12 days ago, and for my first year I decided to try the Advent of Code 2023, which is basically 1 programming problem everyday and they get harder and harder each day. I started HARD, I ate problems, day by day, until... day 10; things started getting pretty hard and couldn't do - I think - pretty average difficulty problems.

You seem to have a preset opinion, and I'm not sure you are interested in re-evaluating it. So this is not written to change your mind.

I've developed production code in C, C++, Rust, and several other languages. And while like pretty much everything, there are situations where it's not a good fit, I find that the solutions tend to be the most robust and require the least post release debugging in Rust. That's my personal experience. It's not hard data. And yes occasionally it's annoying to please the compiler, and if there were no trait constraints or borrow rules, those instances would be easier. But way more often in my experience the compiler complained because my initial solution had problems I didn't realize before. So for me, these situations have been about going from building it the way I wanted to -> compiler tells me I didn't consider an edge case -> changing the implementation and or design to account for that edge case. Also using one example, where is Rust is notoriously hard and or un-ergonomic to use, and dismissing the entire language seems premature to me. For those that insist on learning Rust by implementing a linked list there is https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/.

Advent of Code was okay until I encounterd a problem that required a graph, tree or linked list to solve, where I hit a wall. Most coding exercises are similar--those requiring arrays and hashmaps and sets are okay, but complex data structures are a PITA. (There is an online course dedicated to linked lists in Rust but I couldn't grok it either). IMO you should simply skip problems that you can't solve with your current knowledge level and move on.

I feel obligated to point to the original cannon literature: https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/

I started learning Rust and like how the compiler is fussy about things. My plan was to implement the data structures I knew, but I got stuck at the singly linked list's remove() method. I've read the book as well, but I have no clue how to simplify this further:

My impression from the article is that Zig provides several different hashtables and not all of them are broken in this way.

This reminds me of Aria's comment in her Rust tutorial https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/ about failing to kill LinkedList. One philosophy (and the one Rust chose) for a stdlib is that this is only where things should live when they're so commonly needed that essentially everybody needs them either directly or to talk about. So, HashTable is needed by so much otherwise unrelated software that qualifies, BloomFilter, while it's real useful for some people, not so much. Aria cleaned out Rust's set of standard library containers before Rust 1.0, trying to keep only those most people would need. LinkedList isn't a good general purpose data structure, but, it was too popular and Aria was not able to remove it.

Having multiple hash tables feels like a win (they're optimized for different purposes) but may cost too much in terms of the necessary testing to ensure they all hit the quality you want.

> Cyclic references can be dealt with runtime safety checks too - like Rc and Weak.

Indeed. Starting out with code sprinkled with Rc, Weak, RefCell, etc is perfectly fine and performance will probably not be worse than in any other safe languages. And if you do this, Rust is pretty close to those languages in ease of use for what are otherwise complex topics in Rust.

A good reference for different approaches is Learn Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/

Second, once you've finished something introductory like The Book, read Learning Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists. It really helped me to understand what ownership and borrowing actually mean in practical terms. If you don't mind paying for learning materials, a lot of people recommend Programming Rust, Second Edition by Blandy, Orendorff, and Tindall as either a complement, follow-up, or alternative to The Book.

Learning Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists which highlights a lot of the differences with how you need to structure your code in Rust compared to other languages.