How to (kinda?) learn a language with Advent of Code

Advent of Code is series of 25 different programming challenges, released one a day from December 1st to 25th. I got through 16 this year, which is the farthest I’ve gotten ^{[footnote 1]}. I’m still writing about the experience though, because I accomplished what I wanted out of it: to become “conversational” in Ruby.

By conversational, I mean that I want to:

• be able to write quick scripts in it. Not that I’ll end up writing a lot of scripts in Ruby, but for me it’s a good metric of if I know enough.
• know the basic structures and their general rules, i.e. what makes Ruby unique? I knew nothing about blocks or procs going in, and had only read a little bit about features like symbols.
• be able to read a local bit of code and understand it. This is the most useful criteria, since it’s what you end up doing a lot when you program, but (spoiler for the rest of the post) it’s a bit harder to measure with Advent of Code, since you don’t read a lot of code.

Why Ruby?

My ultimate goal is to be able to contribute to ruby open source projects more. I’ve slowly started using a lot of ruby projects in my free time, like:

• Jekyll: what this blog uses as a static site generator
• Kramdown: a markdown to HTML converter, used by Jekyll
• Sonic Pi: as a live coding music software that uses a “ruby-like” syntax
• Mastodon / Hometown: for social networking

I’ll occasionally look at issues and skim through those repos, but if I ever actually need to add features, it takes me a really long time and I get stumped by seemingly simple things. I made a PR on Kramdown, before I started officially trying to learn Ruby; it took me about a day to write, and in just this one line, I had to figure out that @ was for class variables and that symbols just work, no special initialization needed.

How did it go?

Eh. At the time, I was happy, but a few months out I’m a little disappointed. You can look at my solutions and judge for yourself. My general workflow was:

1. Write the template stuff I’ve memorized (if__file__ == $0, lines = File.read("day1.txt"))
2. Us a mixture of maps, for-loops, and functional stuff to solve the problem
3. Run and realize that I made 5 syntax errors, fix them
4. Add a lot of print statements to debug logic errors
5. Done! Don’t touch the solution again

I wrote down how long it took me to complete each, until I realized I was never gonna really be fast enough to hit the leaderboard, so I stopped that.

The most important step in my opinion was that around day 10, I looked back at all of my previous solutions with a critical eye and noted what I could do to improve things, or just different approaches that used different parts of Ruby. I tried (with a little success) to integrate those approaches going forward as well. Thanks a ton to ahorner for also posting their solutions, which I learned a lot from.

Did Advent of Code help?

Short answer: kinda! It’s definitely a great way to kickstart using a language. Advent of code goes so fast that it forces you to use it, with actual programming problems. It’s great a post-tutorial practice, once you know basic syntax.

There are many Ruby things that are ingrained in me now that would make it a lot easier to write Ruby again:

• __FILE__ == $0 for scripts, as the equivalent to python’s __name__ == "__main__"
• arr.each{|val| ...} are quick and easy to use
• symbols are by far the most useful feature in a language that I’ve seen; there have been many times that I’m hesitant to add strings for things that should be enums or just a hard-coded value in python.
• Might be a bit hacky, but I did use attr_accessor :my_attr on the classes that I wrote all of the time, mostly for debugging.
• Ruby regexes are pretty useful. There was definitely a lot more on them than I could absorb, but I got to use them pretty effectively by the end.

Overall, using the language gets rid of a key blocker if I want to learn more: I write a program that runs without too much friction. Debugging gets easier too, since I’m not at the ignorance part of the Dunning-Kruger curve; I know what I don’t know, and can stop to look that stuff up.

How did Advent of Code not help?

However, Advent of Code wasn’t really the right tool to hit some of my main goals:

• being able to navigate full projects /modules better
• know common libraries better: rails, etc.

Advent of Code just isn’t good for those goals. It might be okay for learning a library or framework, but not at the same time as the language.

I did want to avoid a problem that I’d describe as “using 5 langs like one lang”; i.e. writing every language like you would python. It’s easy to do when learning a language shallowly, and the time pressure of Advent doesn’t help there. You don’t have a ton of time to reflect and improve, but the few times I was able to, I felt myself actually understand a lot more.

Is there a better way to use advent of code? idk. I’ve seen several really interesting projects in advent of code, but I didn’t feel like I would get much out of them:

• Matt Might used a different language each day, with a similar goal to me, but much more ambitious. If I tried that, I think I would end up “using 26 languages like one lang”.
• Ben Visness did the challenges in Dreams, a Playstation game-making game. Definitely more a fun, light-hearted challenge

Advent of code is great, since there are so many older years that I could go back and do in other languages for some coding practice if I wanted to. If I do it again in 2023, I might go for a more fun challenge, something not really practical, but would be really interesting, like:

• writing it in assembly, x86 or uxn
• doing it by hand. Would definitely take forever, but would be an incredible flex
• just doing my normal language, python, so I could focus on getting to the end easily