TL;DR

Puzzles in Advent of Code 2018 edition are fun (so far!).

If you’re looking for some diversion or something to do some exercising (e.g. learning some Raku), I would suggest you giving Advent of Code a try.

These days I’m on the 2018 edition and I’m enjoying it so far. Well, more or less.

In particular, in the last days I appreciated a couple of puzzles:

• puzzle 7 is a nice variation on the problem of scheduling tasks. It builds up, by first asking to produce a simple plan ordering tasks so that pre-requisites are executed before their descendants, then asking also to take execution time and parall execution into consideration;
• puzzle 8 asks you to parse the input to build up a tree, then execute a couple of queries over it.

The second would have been great to learn Raku Grammars but it seemed difficult to express the variable size nature of the children’s list, so I opted for a more traditional recursive solution based on subroutines. I suspect this would have been a good time to try them out though.

Well, enough notekeeping for today, stay safe and have -Ofun people!