Advent of Code

Perusing the interwebs I saw a post for the Advent of Code, and figured I would jump in. Ok, I really thought this post would have more words.

Anyway, to elaborate Advent of Code is a collection of coding challenges.

There seems to be a fancy pants leaderboard but I am not paying attention to that. Mainly I figured since I need to get my hands dirty with Python these would be a good challenge.

Every day has 2 parts, a kind of intro part and then increased difficulty.

I started day 1 yesterday and it went pretty well until I hit part 2. All in all the code is not much different than I might write it in PHP or Javascript although I do think the Python way feels verbose.

Maybe verbose is not the right word but I don't think I like it.

To be fair I think the Python concept of Arrays and Dictionaries irritated me a lot. Then there was how it seemed almost impossible to have it not match 0 to False.

In what world can you not tell a language that zero is not False, what kind of retarded methodology is that.

Fortunately I was working with indexes so I could instead use a bound to at least check if something is "false" by checking that it is above -1

Still, no type comparison? WTF.

Likely I will start Day 2 tomorrow and realise "Oh this is how you do it"

Anyway maybe if you are starting learning some code then Advent of Code is a good challenge to jump in brute forcing some logic puzzles have always been a good way for me to learn syntax and nuances.