My go-to project for fiddling around in a new language is to write a hex dump utility. The goal is to replicate the output of "xxd -p -c 16 <thefile>", and perh

My go-to project for fiddling around in a new language is to write a hex dump utility. The goal is to replicate the output of "xxd -p -c 16 <thefile>", and perhaps allow a few more options. So yeah, self contained puzzles like AoC, Project Euler, Rosalind, etc is the migration path. It's hard to find something reasonably educational and medium level to work on; meanwhile I'm not exactly free to arbitrarily switch to langX at work. I'm also a roguelike fan and every year I think about trying out a very simple 7DRL in some language I'd like to learn, but without libtcod bindings I'd spend all the time working on i/o and display and not any actual game logic. However, something along these lines is probably my best bet for a medium educational "fun" project for language learning so I should figure out how to use libtcod from langX! The puzzle projects do let me get familiar with parsing command line args, reading/writing files, splitting input and strings, etc. So that's definitely valuable.