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26 Programming Languages in 25 Days

255 points by azhenley 4y ago

bruce511 4y ago
We did a similar assignment at University many years ago. I think it was the same assignment, one per day for two weeks. Each time in a different language. The goal was to see how similar code is, and how little it matters which language you pick. Obviously it's a constrained problem set (we didn't have to learn all the ins and outs of each language) but it really opened our eyes to the "commonness" of programming, and free'd us from the tyranny of "I program in x".
- deleted 4y ago
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- aebtebeten 4y ago
  > how little it matters which language obligatory reference to Landin "The next 700 programming languages" (1966) https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Landin66.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Landin66.pdf
- ModernMech 4y ago
  Curious which languages you used. If they were C, C++, Java, and Python then I could see how they could blur together if you squint. Different syntax, similar semantics. But if those languages are C, APL, Erlang, ML and Lisp then I would expect the lesson would be the design space of languages is much larger than the popular imperative languages would have you believe.
  - dfinninger 4y ago
    Sure, but in university that can be a useful exercise, whatever the language. There are many commonalities in just about every language. Learning your first language is hard, you’re second is freeing. At least personally I’ve found that the more languages I study, the easier it gets to pick up a new one, specifically because of the commonalities. Sure, Haskell and Ruby are really different, but when you try to pick up Elixir you’ve got a lot of common ground.
    - goatlover 4y ago
      Languages like APL, Forth and Prolog are different enough that this wouldn't apply until you learn another array, stack, or logic-based language. And with languages like Smalltalk or Lisp, learning how to use the environment will be just as challenging.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    APL might be an outlier here. For the rest, I think the difference lies more in the standard libraries of those languages than the languages themselves. Yes, differences in core language design start to matter when you are considering performance, or structuring larger applications, but for simpler scripts, you're mostly dealing with the standard library. On the other hand, differences will start to show them selves after you spend a while noodling with your script, refactoring it a couple of times and deliberately seeking out opportunities to use language-specific features in the process. This expands the exercise to something more like "a language a week" instead of "a language of day", which is obviously a bit more of a time commitment. But if you want to get value out of a "polyglot" programming exercise like this, I think that's what you really need to do. Otherwise I think you learn lessons that are only correct at surface level.
    - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
      Erlang doesn't have loops. You've got filter, map, reduce, and recursion. It's safe to say for most programs that your Erlang solution is going to look rather different than your ALGOL family one. And Java didn't, until relatively recently (oh god Java 8 was almost 10 years ago), have anonymous functions, which means that you'd be more inclined to express solutions in terms of vulgar loops rather than a map, filter, reduce type operation. Which is to say, they'd definitely look different.
      - nerdponx 4y ago
        > You've got filter, map, reduce, and recursion. Right, and you can implement a recursive function in Haskell, OCaml, or Scheme that looks more or less identical in all 3 languages, and is only a recursion-transformation away from the for-loop version seen in Python, Ruby, Java, etc. So all the functional recursion-based implementations will look similar, and all the imperative loop-based implementations will look similar, and the two classes of implementations will also have a lot of overarching similarity. The basic pattern of "obtain system state, do thing, set up next system state, proceed to next thing" is the same. The differences between languages (read: sets of tools that you are given for expressing algorithms) tend not to become apparent until you've spent a little while working with them. I can't speak specifically to Erlang because I haven't used it, but from what I've seen the story should be the same.
- spikej 4y ago
  We did the same but the idea was to do it in different paradigms: iterative, OO, functional, etc. And the code was very different
  - deleted 4y ago
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- galangalalgol 4y ago
  Even for a one day task it seems language choice could make it much easier or harder depending on the nature of the task. Text formatting and parsing, vector/tensor math, parallelism, network io, all those things vary drastically in difficulty depending on the language chosen. Then, if there are any performance constraints on the problem that is another clear discriminator.
- bmitc 4y ago
  > The goal was to see how similar code is, and how little it matters which language you pick. I think that’s a pretty bad result of the exercise. The point of software isn’t just to do a thing. Good software should properly encode a domain or idea and communicate that to others. If one took the analogy of driving a nail into wood, there are many tools that can do the job, but only a couple that properly handle the job. Because the goal isn’t to just drive the nail, it’s to do it efficiently and ergonomically and in a way easily communicable.
  - WJW 4y ago
    You can write good software in almost* any language though. Encoding of domain and/or clear coding style is mostly orthogonal to language syntax. The OPs exercise is exactly to show that language choice is not all that important, since you can write good software in bad languages and you can write bad software even in the best languages. * Excluding some deliberately opaque languages like brainfuck and malbolge.
    - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
      I would describe programming languages less as encoding problem domain, and more of encoding/enabling solution domains. For example, if you're in Java the language steers towards defining objects that have methods that express your solution, where as in Haskell you'd be more inclined to your solution in terms of a composition of functions. At a lower level, your Java program is more likely to use loops and iteration whereas your Haskell program is more likely to use a recursive solution. Anyone who's tried hammering a Java-shaped solution into an Haskell-shaped language will eventually see the folly.
  - ketralnis 4y ago
    I think you read a comment that they didn’t write. But to take your argument there is still value there. Learning that the goal is to get the nail into the wood and give you a tour of some ways to do that provides different value to practising your memorised best practise of 3/8” 95% iron alloy hammer swings at 20 degree arcs 1.2 times per inch of nail bed. Maybe that’s valuable too but you need to know both. I interview a lot of programmers and I often get told that one of my questions is just impossible because it’s slightly awkward to express in Java. (It’s only Java folk incidentally, even though it’s roughly equally awkward to express in most of the long list of languages we let candidates use.) By analogy these are folk that would have to sit around waiting for their hammer delivery rather than just make do with a mallet for a few minutes.
- kfir 4y ago
  You can get a taste here and decide if you want to go deeper or not - https://github.com/mattmight/advent-of-code-2022/tree/main/day-2 https://github.com/mattmight/advent-of-code-2022/tree/main/d...
- rr808 4y ago
  Most languages have completely different idioms though. Sure you can write functions, loops, if statements the same in dozens of different language syntaxes, but that doesn't prove anything. I've seen loads of codebases written completely backwardly, eg when a C++ programmer writes their first Python app or a Java developer writes Javascript - they're just writing the same style in a different language, not writing idiomatical correct code as a Python or JS developer would.
  - TrueSlacker0 4y ago
    ... and it's amazing how it works perfectly fine for a basic 1 day program as the og author needs. No need to make it "idiomatically correct"
- rqtwteye 4y ago
  "The goal was to see how similar code is, and how little it matters which language you pick." I think this thinking is a mistake. If you learn languages superficially, you will end up writing the same code just with slightly different syntax. It can take a long time to really understand a language and ecosystem and use its capabilities.
  - TrueSlacker0 4y ago
    While I mostly agree, A program this "basic" is not going to go far enough to learn anything that pushes any language far enough to learn it's limits.
    - rqtwteye 4y ago
      Which means it's an almost useless exercise.
maxiepoo 4y ago
For context, Matt Might is formerly a professor whose research was in programming languages/program analysis. Professors like to code too!
- azhenley 4y ago
  I’ve really missed his blog. I read his posts over and over during grad school. His story of pivoting from PL research to medical research (and being a star in the field) is quite motivating.
  - lamida 4y ago
    I have been reading Matt' blog for quite long too. I read his post on his son condition but never really noticed if he really switch his academic careers for his son. I am pasting the really motivating video sharing the story [1] and a NY times article here [2]. [1] https://www.facebook.com/freethinksuperhuman/videos/1530650690395570/ https://www.facebook.com/freethinksuperhuman/videos/15306506... [2] https://archive.is/l7pCA https://archive.is/l7pCA
    - bmorton 4y ago
      I stopped reading his blog when we wrote about how to get tenure and completely omitted talking about all of his wife's stay-at-home work.
      - arolihas 4y ago
        Can you explain why? What relevance does his wife's stay at home work have to someone else trying to get tenure? Do you think he doesn't appreciate his wife and that rubs you the wrong way?
  - mattmight 4y ago
    Thank you for the kind words! I missed blogging too, so I set a New Year’s resolution in January to write at least two blog posts this year. It had been over seven years since my last! I still hadn’t written one by November, but now I’ve got three for the year. I’m optimistic I can keep it up now.
panzagl 4y ago
No FORTH, APL, Clojure or Rust? My HN bingo card is empty...
- tuukkah 4y ago
  Well, Common Lisp and Erlang there made up for it. Clojure and Rust were on their list of strong languages that they didn't end up needing: > F#, Ocaml, Rust, Perl, Swift, Clojure, Smalltalk Forth and APL were on the list of probably impractical languages: > APL / J, Prolog, Forth, m4, COBOL, Fortran, Ada
- LeFantome 4y ago
  I can see skipping APL. Also, Rust could be frustrating if you only had a day. It like saying you are going to learn a new sport every day and skipping snowboarding because while you can always kick or throw a ball badly, just standing up and falling down continuously for a day does not actually teach you anything about snowboarding. Forth would be a good one though. Both simple and different.
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    It's likely that the professor knows some Rust already. In which case Rust is a powerful tool to bring to AoC late on because you can afford to take a not-so-algorithmically clever approach and Rust's optimiser will save you. Take day 16. The professor did it in Python, with which they have some experience. My Part II solution is pretty bad, it's a combinatorial explosion resulting from a search of the solution space with both the elephant and myself trying every option. But, I wrote it in Rust, so this bad solution finishes in five minutes. If I'd written this terrible solution in Python it may have taken hours to finish...
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- linhns 4y ago
  Both Clojure and Rust are not very fast to learn to the problem-solving level. Other languages like Java or C++ can substitute for them. APL probably too hard to learn in 1-day
armchairhacker 4y ago
Learning a programming language in 1 day to solve a particular problem isn’t the same as learning it over years to write actual production code. I doubt the author was writing “idiomatic” code and he probably transplanted paradigms from more familiar languages in the newer ones. But it’s still very useful and I’m sure he learned a lot and absorbed of some of the new languages’ programming styles. You don’t master idiomatic functional programming from one week of writing Haskell, but it does introduce you to basic concepts like functors, lambdas and embedding computation (IO) in data.
- canadianfella 4y ago
  [dead]
- fnands 4y ago
  Definitely true (not that should stop anyone, little projects like these are a great way to get exposed to other languages). From my personal experience of doing AoC in Julia this year, my Julia code started out smelling a lot like Python, but managed to adopt a bit more of the Julian way of doing things as I went along (not done yet though...)
- DonaldPShimoda 4y ago
  For what it's worth, the author is well-known in the field of programming languages and was a professor in that area at the University of Utah for a number of years before changing life focus and relocating to the University of Alabama's Precision Medicine Institute. Which isn't to say that you're wrong, but rather that the author is likely well aware of these particular shortcomings of the exercise. But then the exercise wasn't "write perfectly idiomatic code in a different language every day", but just "learn some languages I didn't know before".
Izmaki 4y ago
Next on HN: "Hello World in 100 languages, in just 2 hour"
- wiseowise 4y ago
  Hello world is different from solving actual problems in AoC.
  - greenpeas 4y ago
    AoC is somewhat more difficult, but is it worth a blog post? Especially for a professor? The stats https://adventofcode.com/2022/stats https://adventofcode.com/2022/stats show that there are ~9000 people who solved all of the problems. Even if a fraction of those wrote a "I solved 25 problems" blog post, there'd be HN front-page material for months. P.S. I'm somewhat surprised by this community's adoration of AoC and at the same time aversion to Leetcode and/or competitive programming in general. Arguably, many leetcode problems are more interesting (from an algorithmic point of view), are much shorter (although I guess for some, part of the fun of AoC is the elaborate story), and most importantly, have extensive test cases, that require generalized solutions.
    - DonaldPShimoda 4y ago
      > AoC is somewhat more difficult, but is it worth a blog post? The AoC isn't the blog post; the choice of using a different language every day is the blog post. Does that not seem even remotely interesting to you? > I'm somewhat surprised by this community's adoration of AoC and at the same time aversion to Leetcode and/or competitive programming in general. AoC is deliberately a game. It's spirited and fun. Leetcode is a by-product of an interviewing system that worked kind-of well at one company once upon a time, and then everybody decided they needed to do the same thing because that company had a Big Name, and now we have a broken interview process that is — in most practical respects — completely useless. That's not to say some Leetcode problems aren't good or fun problems to work on, but the website itself was purpose-built to help people game a broken interview process (which has, incidentally, only made the process worse).
redrobein 4y ago
> C++ [no experience (beyond meta-programming)] Curious about this line if op is here.
- mattmight 4y ago
  I’ve never written any serious software using C++. But, I did once learn how to do template meta-programming: https://matt.might.net/articles/c++-template-meta-programming-with-lambda-calculus/ https://matt.might.net/articles/c++-template-meta-programmin...
medo-bear 4y ago
great to see prof. might writing about programming again! im curious what he thinks about the ergonomics of the languages he used
- mattmight 4y ago
  Thanks! I have a part two planned to comment more about the languages / days themselves. This post was just getting too long to include it here.
  - medo-bear 4y ago
    neat! looking forward to it
Hovertruck 4y ago
A note to the original author, it looks like you're including the inputs with your solutions on github which the AoC folks request that you not do: https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/wiki/faqs/copyright/inputs https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/wiki/faqs/copyright/in...
- mattmight 4y ago
  Woops -- I'll take those down. Thanks for pointing that out.
jezzamon 4y ago
Nice!! I needed to understand some go scripts with work so I used Advent of Code as an opportunity to learn it as a new language and solve the next problem using it. Unfortunately that day's problem was more difficult than the rest so it took me more than a day to solve it, but it was a pretty nice way to ramp up on a new language!
- mattmight 4y ago
  I had a similar thought after finishing:if you wanted to really learn a new language in depth, you could solve all 25 days using that language.
  - Jtsummers 4y ago
    This is what I try to do. I solve them all (or nearly, I did one in Python only this year) in Common Lisp (my hobby language of choice), and the last few years I try to tackle them in a second language (Ada, Rust, Python, C++) up to the point that my time is too limited to do both versions (or where I find the second version is adding nothing to my understanding of the language I'm exploring). This year I used Python as my second language (still plan to finish) but with a strong emphasis on TDD and property-based testing since I'm already familiar, but not fluent, with Python.
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    I think I'd have felt the same way up until I learned Rust in 2021, and now I just think "I'd rather solve this in Rust" almost always. Rust might have spoiled me for other languages. But yes, in general AoC is definitely a good way to learn a programming language. Since we probably don't need vast numbers of Rust programmers it makes sense to acquire say, Python, or Typescript or something if you're working in some discipline where programming might be useful but is not your core skill. The initial headline of your front page intrigued me because I had noticed in surveying my own institution (the one where I studied, both as an undergraduate and as a postgraduate, and where I now happen to work) that while most of the undergrad courses of study we offer that require mathematics include at least an opportunity to program, Medicine does not. I reasoned at the time that the Medics have to cram such a large amount of other material into their brief time that maybe there's just no room to teach them to write code if they are to sleep (in my country they certainly won't have time to sleep once they're junior doctors)
xnacly 4y ago
Very impressive i couldn‘t even get past day 7
- mattmight 4y ago
  Day 7 is still impressive!
willio58 4y ago
Great way to get experience with a bunch of languages quickly! It's not like you'd put these languages on your resume but you can gain a sense for what each one is like/how easily you'd be able to work in it for a project. I likely wouldn't do this personally out of pure laziness but good on you!
judofyr 4y ago
In 2018 I did the same thing, but I asked my friends for the list of languages (they didn’t know what it was for) so I ended up with far more esoteric languages: https://github.com/judofyr/aoc2018 https://github.com/judofyr/aoc2018 In the end I lost the motivation once I only had the “regular” languages left. I was also solving them as quickly as possible (in Ruby) to get on the leaderboard so it was kinda boring to also solve them again later on.
aussiesnack 4y ago
But which was the best?
charlieyu1 4y ago
I have to say I still haven’t really figured out how TeX works, despite using latex for years. I can’t even do a for loop or simple arithmetic or find the size of an array, let alone implement complete algorithms. Is there anyway I can learn this?
- canadianfella 4y ago
  [dead]
- mattmight 4y ago
  (Article author here.) This was the reference I used for TeX programming: https://pgfplots.sourceforge.net/TeX-programming-notes.pdf https://pgfplots.sourceforge.net/TeX-programming-notes.pdf
maradon 4y ago
https://dev.to/taw/100-languages-speedrun-episode-01-python-22c3 https://dev.to/taw/100-languages-speedrun-episode-01-python-... 100 languages in 100 days...
- DonaldPShimoda 4y ago
  Ah, the HN Classic™: "I won't comment on the present post except to link you to another project in the same space."
d12bb 4y ago
I did the same challenge this year, though I didn't use as “esoteric” languages (TeX… I love it :D), but I've made it more difficult than necessary by using the languages I'm familiar with first, before realizing this might be a mistake… I've written on my learnings on the AoC subreddit[0] and if you'd like to see my code, it's of course on GitHub[1]. 0: https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/comments/zwi0t4/2022_what_i_learned_using_a_different_language/ https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/comments/zwi0t4/2022_w... 1: https://github.com/d12bb/AdventOfCode/tree/main/2022 https://github.com/d12bb/AdventOfCode/tree/main/2022
munificent 4y ago
The sleep trick is something I do with my hobby projects all the time, without really deliberately coming up with it as a strategy. By the time I get the kids in bed at night, I'm often out of steam. Sometimes I try to make some progress on a project, but I usually don't have the willpower to push through a stumbling block. After many many nights of staying up late and losing sleep trying to power through but not actually getting anything working, I finally realized it's better to just go to bed. But I also feel sad if I go to bed early without making progress on something I'm excited about. So I started tricking myself by telling myself, "Well, you can just think about the project as you fall asleep." That's usually enough to get me in bed early. And, lo and behold, quite often, I figure something out as I'm drifting off. Then when I wake up the next morning, I can get it implemented while I have my morning coffee. It's a really pleasant routine.
- feiss 4y ago
  Hah! I have the same experience. When my children manage to sleep I'm too tired to do anything, so I program and think in computer problems as I fall asleep. I have to get up very early to work, so I don't have the chance to put them into practice the next morning (unless I thought of something related to work), but at least it helps a bit to cope with frustration and sadness ;)
- JonChesterfield 4y ago
  Notebook by the bed helps. If I have an idea while drifting off, there's sometimes a concern that it'll disappear by the morning and that stops me falling asleep. So I write it down.
unquietwiki 4y ago
That's really cool. It's basically a good way to practice multiple languages to see what you might like; and without an Advent of Code, I've used over 20 languages myself. I'm sad Nim wasn't on his list: I've started using that lately, and find it to be useful.
hk1337 4y ago
I'm not sure if this was OPs intent but this reminded me of a little Christmas themed language task fun I started at one job. Write up on the whiteboard in various languages to echo "Ho Ho Ho", preferably in shorthand, one-liner if possible. Like python would be ("Ho "*3).strip()
ngcc_hk 4y ago
The vim-brew is respectful, but I wonder why not choose vcode-brew (with vcode in vim mode) plus git.

255 points by azhenley 4y ago

We did a similar assignment at University many years ago. I think it was the same assignment, one per day for two weeks. Each time in a different language. The goal was to see how similar code is, and how little it matters which language you pick. Obviously it's a constrained problem set (we didn't have to learn all the ins and outs of each language) but it really opened our eyes to the "commonness" of programming, and free'd us from the tyranny of "I program in x".

deleted 4y ago
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aebtebeten 4y ago
> how little it matters which language obligatory reference to Landin "The next 700 programming languages" (1966) https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Landin66.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Landin66.pdf
ModernMech 4y ago
Curious which languages you used. If they were C, C++, Java, and Python then I could see how they could blur together if you squint. Different syntax, similar semantics. But if those languages are C, APL, Erlang, ML and Lisp then I would expect the lesson would be the design space of languages is much larger than the popular imperative languages would have you believe.
- dfinninger 4y ago
  Sure, but in university that can be a useful exercise, whatever the language. There are many commonalities in just about every language. Learning your first language is hard, you’re second is freeing. At least personally I’ve found that the more languages I study, the easier it gets to pick up a new one, specifically because of the commonalities. Sure, Haskell and Ruby are really different, but when you try to pick up Elixir you’ve got a lot of common ground.
  - goatlover 4y ago
    Languages like APL, Forth and Prolog are different enough that this wouldn't apply until you learn another array, stack, or logic-based language. And with languages like Smalltalk or Lisp, learning how to use the environment will be just as challenging.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  APL might be an outlier here. For the rest, I think the difference lies more in the standard libraries of those languages than the languages themselves. Yes, differences in core language design start to matter when you are considering performance, or structuring larger applications, but for simpler scripts, you're mostly dealing with the standard library. On the other hand, differences will start to show them selves after you spend a while noodling with your script, refactoring it a couple of times and deliberately seeking out opportunities to use language-specific features in the process. This expands the exercise to something more like "a language a week" instead of "a language of day", which is obviously a bit more of a time commitment. But if you want to get value out of a "polyglot" programming exercise like this, I think that's what you really need to do. Otherwise I think you learn lessons that are only correct at surface level.
  - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
    Erlang doesn't have loops. You've got filter, map, reduce, and recursion. It's safe to say for most programs that your Erlang solution is going to look rather different than your ALGOL family one. And Java didn't, until relatively recently (oh god Java 8 was almost 10 years ago), have anonymous functions, which means that you'd be more inclined to express solutions in terms of vulgar loops rather than a map, filter, reduce type operation. Which is to say, they'd definitely look different.
    - nerdponx 4y ago
      > You've got filter, map, reduce, and recursion. Right, and you can implement a recursive function in Haskell, OCaml, or Scheme that looks more or less identical in all 3 languages, and is only a recursion-transformation away from the for-loop version seen in Python, Ruby, Java, etc. So all the functional recursion-based implementations will look similar, and all the imperative loop-based implementations will look similar, and the two classes of implementations will also have a lot of overarching similarity. The basic pattern of "obtain system state, do thing, set up next system state, proceed to next thing" is the same. The differences between languages (read: sets of tools that you are given for expressing algorithms) tend not to become apparent until you've spent a little while working with them. I can't speak specifically to Erlang because I haven't used it, but from what I've seen the story should be the same.
spikej 4y ago
We did the same but the idea was to do it in different paradigms: iterative, OO, functional, etc. And the code was very different
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
galangalalgol 4y ago
Even for a one day task it seems language choice could make it much easier or harder depending on the nature of the task. Text formatting and parsing, vector/tensor math, parallelism, network io, all those things vary drastically in difficulty depending on the language chosen. Then, if there are any performance constraints on the problem that is another clear discriminator.
bmitc 4y ago
> The goal was to see how similar code is, and how little it matters which language you pick. I think that’s a pretty bad result of the exercise. The point of software isn’t just to do a thing. Good software should properly encode a domain or idea and communicate that to others. If one took the analogy of driving a nail into wood, there are many tools that can do the job, but only a couple that properly handle the job. Because the goal isn’t to just drive the nail, it’s to do it efficiently and ergonomically and in a way easily communicable.
- WJW 4y ago
  You can write good software in almost* any language though. Encoding of domain and/or clear coding style is mostly orthogonal to language syntax. The OPs exercise is exactly to show that language choice is not all that important, since you can write good software in bad languages and you can write bad software even in the best languages. * Excluding some deliberately opaque languages like brainfuck and malbolge.
  - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
    I would describe programming languages less as encoding problem domain, and more of encoding/enabling solution domains. For example, if you're in Java the language steers towards defining objects that have methods that express your solution, where as in Haskell you'd be more inclined to your solution in terms of a composition of functions. At a lower level, your Java program is more likely to use loops and iteration whereas your Haskell program is more likely to use a recursive solution. Anyone who's tried hammering a Java-shaped solution into an Haskell-shaped language will eventually see the folly.
- ketralnis 4y ago
  I think you read a comment that they didn’t write. But to take your argument there is still value there. Learning that the goal is to get the nail into the wood and give you a tour of some ways to do that provides different value to practising your memorised best practise of 3/8” 95% iron alloy hammer swings at 20 degree arcs 1.2 times per inch of nail bed. Maybe that’s valuable too but you need to know both. I interview a lot of programmers and I often get told that one of my questions is just impossible because it’s slightly awkward to express in Java. (It’s only Java folk incidentally, even though it’s roughly equally awkward to express in most of the long list of languages we let candidates use.) By analogy these are folk that would have to sit around waiting for their hammer delivery rather than just make do with a mallet for a few minutes.
kfir 4y ago
You can get a taste here and decide if you want to go deeper or not - https://github.com/mattmight/advent-of-code-2022/tree/main/day-2 https://github.com/mattmight/advent-of-code-2022/tree/main/d...
rr808 4y ago
Most languages have completely different idioms though. Sure you can write functions, loops, if statements the same in dozens of different language syntaxes, but that doesn't prove anything. I've seen loads of codebases written completely backwardly, eg when a C++ programmer writes their first Python app or a Java developer writes Javascript - they're just writing the same style in a different language, not writing idiomatical correct code as a Python or JS developer would.
- TrueSlacker0 4y ago
  ... and it's amazing how it works perfectly fine for a basic 1 day program as the og author needs. No need to make it "idiomatically correct"
rqtwteye 4y ago
"The goal was to see how similar code is, and how little it matters which language you pick." I think this thinking is a mistake. If you learn languages superficially, you will end up writing the same code just with slightly different syntax. It can take a long time to really understand a language and ecosystem and use its capabilities.
- TrueSlacker0 4y ago
  While I mostly agree, A program this "basic" is not going to go far enough to learn anything that pushes any language far enough to learn it's limits.
  - rqtwteye 4y ago
    Which means it's an almost useless exercise.

maxiepoo 4y ago

For context, Matt Might is formerly a professor whose research was in programming languages/program analysis. Professors like to code too!

azhenley 4y ago
I’ve really missed his blog. I read his posts over and over during grad school. His story of pivoting from PL research to medical research (and being a star in the field) is quite motivating.
- lamida 4y ago
  I have been reading Matt' blog for quite long too. I read his post on his son condition but never really noticed if he really switch his academic careers for his son. I am pasting the really motivating video sharing the story [1] and a NY times article here [2]. [1] https://www.facebook.com/freethinksuperhuman/videos/1530650690395570/ https://www.facebook.com/freethinksuperhuman/videos/15306506... [2] https://archive.is/l7pCA https://archive.is/l7pCA
  - bmorton 4y ago
    I stopped reading his blog when we wrote about how to get tenure and completely omitted talking about all of his wife's stay-at-home work.
    - arolihas 4y ago
      Can you explain why? What relevance does his wife's stay at home work have to someone else trying to get tenure? Do you think he doesn't appreciate his wife and that rubs you the wrong way?
- mattmight 4y ago
  Thank you for the kind words! I missed blogging too, so I set a New Year’s resolution in January to write at least two blog posts this year. It had been over seven years since my last! I still hadn’t written one by November, but now I’ve got three for the year. I’m optimistic I can keep it up now.

panzagl 4y ago

No FORTH, APL, Clojure or Rust? My HN bingo card is empty...

tuukkah 4y ago
Well, Common Lisp and Erlang there made up for it. Clojure and Rust were on their list of strong languages that they didn't end up needing: > F#, Ocaml, Rust, Perl, Swift, Clojure, Smalltalk Forth and APL were on the list of probably impractical languages: > APL / J, Prolog, Forth, m4, COBOL, Fortran, Ada
LeFantome 4y ago
I can see skipping APL. Also, Rust could be frustrating if you only had a day. It like saying you are going to learn a new sport every day and skipping snowboarding because while you can always kick or throw a ball badly, just standing up and falling down continuously for a day does not actually teach you anything about snowboarding. Forth would be a good one though. Both simple and different.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  It's likely that the professor knows some Rust already. In which case Rust is a powerful tool to bring to AoC late on because you can afford to take a not-so-algorithmically clever approach and Rust's optimiser will save you. Take day 16. The professor did it in Python, with which they have some experience. My Part II solution is pretty bad, it's a combinatorial explosion resulting from a search of the solution space with both the elephant and myself trying every option. But, I wrote it in Rust, so this bad solution finishes in five minutes. If I'd written this terrible solution in Python it may have taken hours to finish...
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linhns 4y ago
Both Clojure and Rust are not very fast to learn to the problem-solving level. Other languages like Java or C++ can substitute for them. APL probably too hard to learn in 1-day

armchairhacker 4y ago

Learning a programming language in 1 day to solve a particular problem isn’t the same as learning it over years to write actual production code. I doubt the author was writing “idiomatic” code and he probably transplanted paradigms from more familiar languages in the newer ones. But it’s still very useful and I’m sure he learned a lot and absorbed of some of the new languages’ programming styles. You don’t master idiomatic functional programming from one week of writing Haskell, but it does introduce you to basic concepts like functors, lambdas and embedding computation (IO) in data.

canadianfella 4y ago
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fnands 4y ago
Definitely true (not that should stop anyone, little projects like these are a great way to get exposed to other languages). From my personal experience of doing AoC in Julia this year, my Julia code started out smelling a lot like Python, but managed to adopt a bit more of the Julian way of doing things as I went along (not done yet though...)
DonaldPShimoda 4y ago
For what it's worth, the author is well-known in the field of programming languages and was a professor in that area at the University of Utah for a number of years before changing life focus and relocating to the University of Alabama's Precision Medicine Institute. Which isn't to say that you're wrong, but rather that the author is likely well aware of these particular shortcomings of the exercise. But then the exercise wasn't "write perfectly idiomatic code in a different language every day", but just "learn some languages I didn't know before".

Izmaki 4y ago

Next on HN: "Hello World in 100 languages, in just 2 hour"

wiseowise 4y ago
Hello world is different from solving actual problems in AoC.
- greenpeas 4y ago
  AoC is somewhat more difficult, but is it worth a blog post? Especially for a professor? The stats https://adventofcode.com/2022/stats https://adventofcode.com/2022/stats show that there are ~9000 people who solved all of the problems. Even if a fraction of those wrote a "I solved 25 problems" blog post, there'd be HN front-page material for months. P.S. I'm somewhat surprised by this community's adoration of AoC and at the same time aversion to Leetcode and/or competitive programming in general. Arguably, many leetcode problems are more interesting (from an algorithmic point of view), are much shorter (although I guess for some, part of the fun of AoC is the elaborate story), and most importantly, have extensive test cases, that require generalized solutions.
  - DonaldPShimoda 4y ago
    > AoC is somewhat more difficult, but is it worth a blog post? The AoC isn't the blog post; the choice of using a different language every day is the blog post. Does that not seem even remotely interesting to you? > I'm somewhat surprised by this community's adoration of AoC and at the same time aversion to Leetcode and/or competitive programming in general. AoC is deliberately a game. It's spirited and fun. Leetcode is a by-product of an interviewing system that worked kind-of well at one company once upon a time, and then everybody decided they needed to do the same thing because that company had a Big Name, and now we have a broken interview process that is — in most practical respects — completely useless. That's not to say some Leetcode problems aren't good or fun problems to work on, but the website itself was purpose-built to help people game a broken interview process (which has, incidentally, only made the process worse).

redrobein 4y ago

> C++ [no experience (beyond meta-programming)] Curious about this line if op is here.

mattmight 4y ago
I’ve never written any serious software using C++. But, I did once learn how to do template meta-programming: https://matt.might.net/articles/c++-template-meta-programming-with-lambda-calculus/ https://matt.might.net/articles/c++-template-meta-programmin...

medo-bear 4y ago

great to see prof. might writing about programming again! im curious what he thinks about the ergonomics of the languages he used

mattmight 4y ago
Thanks! I have a part two planned to comment more about the languages / days themselves. This post was just getting too long to include it here.
- medo-bear 4y ago
  neat! looking forward to it

Hovertruck 4y ago

A note to the original author, it looks like you're including the inputs with your solutions on github which the AoC folks request that you not do: https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/wiki/faqs/copyright/inputs https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/wiki/faqs/copyright/in...

mattmight 4y ago
Woops -- I'll take those down. Thanks for pointing that out.

jezzamon 4y ago

Nice!! I needed to understand some go scripts with work so I used Advent of Code as an opportunity to learn it as a new language and solve the next problem using it. Unfortunately that day's problem was more difficult than the rest so it took me more than a day to solve it, but it was a pretty nice way to ramp up on a new language!

mattmight 4y ago
I had a similar thought after finishing:if you wanted to really learn a new language in depth, you could solve all 25 days using that language.
- Jtsummers 4y ago
  This is what I try to do. I solve them all (or nearly, I did one in Python only this year) in Common Lisp (my hobby language of choice), and the last few years I try to tackle them in a second language (Ada, Rust, Python, C++) up to the point that my time is too limited to do both versions (or where I find the second version is adding nothing to my understanding of the language I'm exploring). This year I used Python as my second language (still plan to finish) but with a strong emphasis on TDD and property-based testing since I'm already familiar, but not fluent, with Python.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  I think I'd have felt the same way up until I learned Rust in 2021, and now I just think "I'd rather solve this in Rust" almost always. Rust might have spoiled me for other languages. But yes, in general AoC is definitely a good way to learn a programming language. Since we probably don't need vast numbers of Rust programmers it makes sense to acquire say, Python, or Typescript or something if you're working in some discipline where programming might be useful but is not your core skill. The initial headline of your front page intrigued me because I had noticed in surveying my own institution (the one where I studied, both as an undergraduate and as a postgraduate, and where I now happen to work) that while most of the undergrad courses of study we offer that require mathematics include at least an opportunity to program, Medicine does not. I reasoned at the time that the Medics have to cram such a large amount of other material into their brief time that maybe there's just no room to teach them to write code if they are to sleep (in my country they certainly won't have time to sleep once they're junior doctors)

xnacly 4y ago

Very impressive i couldn‘t even get past day 7

mattmight 4y ago
Day 7 is still impressive!

willio58 4y ago

Great way to get experience with a bunch of languages quickly! It's not like you'd put these languages on your resume but you can gain a sense for what each one is like/how easily you'd be able to work in it for a project. I likely wouldn't do this personally out of pure laziness but good on you!

judofyr 4y ago

In 2018 I did the same thing, but I asked my friends for the list of languages (they didn’t know what it was for) so I ended up with far more esoteric languages: https://github.com/judofyr/aoc2018 https://github.com/judofyr/aoc2018 In the end I lost the motivation once I only had the “regular” languages left. I was also solving them as quickly as possible (in Ruby) to get on the leaderboard so it was kinda boring to also solve them again later on.

aussiesnack 4y ago

But which was the best?

charlieyu1 4y ago

I have to say I still haven’t really figured out how TeX works, despite using latex for years. I can’t even do a for loop or simple arithmetic or find the size of an array, let alone implement complete algorithms. Is there anyway I can learn this?

canadianfella 4y ago
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mattmight 4y ago
(Article author here.) This was the reference I used for TeX programming: https://pgfplots.sourceforge.net/TeX-programming-notes.pdf https://pgfplots.sourceforge.net/TeX-programming-notes.pdf

maradon 4y ago

https://dev.to/taw/100-languages-speedrun-episode-01-python-22c3 https://dev.to/taw/100-languages-speedrun-episode-01-python-... 100 languages in 100 days...

DonaldPShimoda 4y ago
Ah, the HN Classic™: "I won't comment on the present post except to link you to another project in the same space."

d12bb 4y ago

I did the same challenge this year, though I didn't use as “esoteric” languages (TeX… I love it :D), but I've made it more difficult than necessary by using the languages I'm familiar with first, before realizing this might be a mistake… I've written on my learnings on the AoC subreddit[0] and if you'd like to see my code, it's of course on GitHub[1]. 0: https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/comments/zwi0t4/2022_what_i_learned_using_a_different_language/ https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/comments/zwi0t4/2022_w... 1: https://github.com/d12bb/AdventOfCode/tree/main/2022 https://github.com/d12bb/AdventOfCode/tree/main/2022

munificent 4y ago

The sleep trick is something I do with my hobby projects all the time, without really deliberately coming up with it as a strategy. By the time I get the kids in bed at night, I'm often out of steam. Sometimes I try to make some progress on a project, but I usually don't have the willpower to push through a stumbling block. After many many nights of staying up late and losing sleep trying to power through but not actually getting anything working, I finally realized it's better to just go to bed. But I also feel sad if I go to bed early without making progress on something I'm excited about. So I started tricking myself by telling myself, "Well, you can just think about the project as you fall asleep." That's usually enough to get me in bed early. And, lo and behold, quite often, I figure something out as I'm drifting off. Then when I wake up the next morning, I can get it implemented while I have my morning coffee. It's a really pleasant routine.

feiss 4y ago
Hah! I have the same experience. When my children manage to sleep I'm too tired to do anything, so I program and think in computer problems as I fall asleep. I have to get up very early to work, so I don't have the chance to put them into practice the next morning (unless I thought of something related to work), but at least it helps a bit to cope with frustration and sadness ;)
JonChesterfield 4y ago
Notebook by the bed helps. If I have an idea while drifting off, there's sometimes a concern that it'll disappear by the morning and that stops me falling asleep. So I write it down.

unquietwiki 4y ago

That's really cool. It's basically a good way to practice multiple languages to see what you might like; and without an Advent of Code, I've used over 20 languages myself. I'm sad Nim wasn't on his list: I've started using that lately, and find it to be useful.

hk1337 4y ago

I'm not sure if this was OPs intent but this reminded me of a little Christmas themed language task fun I started at one job. Write up on the whiteboard in various languages to echo "Ho Ho Ho", preferably in shorthand, one-liner if possible. Like python would be ("Ho "*3).strip()

ngcc_hk 4y ago

The vim-brew is respectful, but I wonder why not choose vcode-brew (with vcode in vim mode) plus git.