At the beginning of December 2015, an impressive site catches my attention: Advent of code Once you sign in, you were able to have one puzzle a day “to help” Santa for Christmas. I didn’t have too much time during those days, but after Christmas, the site continues to be up, and I started my journey with them.
Around that time, Yan Cui started to post his solutions with F# on his blog. My solutions were on Scala, and I wonder if I should do the same for Scala, that is why this page exist.
This set of puzzles varies in its complexity, but they are good to stretch your muscles in different parts of our brains that might not be as fit as they could be. In addition to the puzzle solutions, I will post my input and my output which is different for every person. While finding the solution of the puzzles, I got stuck a lot of times. Sometimes, wondering if I could find a solution and I certainly did on Yan’s blog and other places like this repo, but the solution didn’t help too much because I didn’t have an input-output to run my solution. My hope is these set of posts could help somebody not to give up on the puzzles and continue his/her fun learning with them.
In the future, my idea is to write the solutions with other languages (Ex. Clojure, Javascript, Go, Elixir). By doing so, I will try to compare them to understand better what type of problems a new language is more suitable to solve. Some aspect to compare could be the amount of libraries needed for the solution or the execution time.
It is time to help the Santa again, but I didn’t have time this year to learn a new language; so, I will stay with the classics and implement the puzzles with Scala again.