Consider Yourself a Developer? You Should Solve the Project Euler Problems

Re:Consider Yourself a Developer? You Should Solve the Proje... by AceJohnny2 on Friday February 15, 2019 @06:19PM (#19175682)

I used Project Euler as a framework of problems when I was learning Go. The experience disenchanted me from the value of Project Euler for that purpose.

Project Euler is more about mathematical problems that you need to apply some generic algorithmic concepts but more importantly mathematical thinking to. It didn't drive me to exercise anything particular feature of the language I was using. I used it with Go, but I just as well could've used C, or Python. Which is part of Euler's point, really: not to be linked to a particular language.

I didn't complete 50 exercises however. I think I reached in the low 20s, stopping at a problem that involved Pascal's Triangle [1]. By that point, all problems had exercised mathematical ability, and none of my programming ability, which is why I stopped.

Maybe further exercises provide more of a programming challenge?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_triangle

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Re:Consider Yourself a Developer? You Should Solve the Proje... by synthc on Friday February 15, 2019 @06:32PM (#19175781)

Advent of Code is a similar project, that has much more relevant exercises that do not rely on knowing arcane details about number theory

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Re:Consider Yourself a Developer? You Should Solve the Proje... by AceJohnny2 on Friday February 15, 2019 @06:56PM (#19175930)

Thanks for the recommendation. I should try that.

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Re:Consider Yourself a Developer? You Should Solve the Proje... by crispyambulance on Friday February 15, 2019 @06:32PM (#19175776)

The nice thing about math problems is that they're reasonably self-contained. If they didn't focus on toy math problems they would have to do other stuff like endless, increasingly complex form validation, filesystem manipulation, or things like graphics that involve external libraries-- it would just become hard to manage for code-golf scenarios, I think.

What would be a non math-heavy alternative to project euler be like?

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Re:Consider Yourself a Developer? You Should Solve the Proje... by IronBacon on Saturday February 16, 2019 @02:46AM (#19177594)

Similar to Project Euler but about bioinformatics I would say http://rosalind.info/problems/locations/

But for learning a specific programming language and confront with other developers, not mentioned yet, there is http://exercism.io/

Edit: also http://www.puzzlenode.com/

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Re:Consider Yourself a Developer? You Should Solve the Proje... by msla on Friday February 15, 2019 @06:52PM (#19175904)

> If they didn't focus on toy math problems they would have to do other stuff like endless, increasingly complex form validation, filesystem manipulation, or things like graphics that involve external libraries-- it would just become hard to manage for code-golf scenarios, I think.

It would also make it hard to use the exercises in some languages. For example, awk or retrocomputing languages like JOSS or BLISS.

There's definitely a need to have good little or mid-sized projects which do call for library-wrangling, though. They help get programmers acquainted with the culture surrounding the language, and what kinds of problems other people using the language are solving.

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Re:Consider Yourself a Developer? You Should Solve the Proje... by ambulancechaser on Friday February 15, 2019 @06:37PM (#19175818)

Advent of Code fits this bill nicely. I think 2017's was particularly nice. I didn't go far this year.

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Re:Consider Yourself a Developer? You Should Solve the Proje... by infecto on Friday February 15, 2019 @06:36PM (#19175815)

Leetcode problems? Hacker rank?

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Re:Consider Yourself a Developer? You Should Solve the Proje... by mlazos on Friday February 15, 2019 @08:22PM (#19176372)

A lot of the time I try to see how far I can push the brute force solution which turns into a nice little programming exercise in optimization.

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