#AdventOfCode Day 22 done in #Haskell. After the rather weird previous two days where the exact nature of the input played a large role, this was finally a rather straight-forward and enjoyable programming task again.
@kosmikus thank goodness, yesterday’s was a nightmare and more graft than fun (well the second part at least). I hadn’t realised what a time commitment #AdventOfCode was!
@mindshoot Yesterday was the worst day for me by far, partially also because I thought I had an idea in mind that might work independently of the input, and only started looking at the input more closely relatively late. But I somehow find it unsatisfactory to solve the problem for what very clearly constitutes a narrow special case, so I much prefer a task such as today's.
@kosmikus same, if it wasn’t for the Sunk Cost Fallacy and the fact there’s a work leader board, I would totally have baled! I’ve been going round like a zombie for the last few days as family and the lead-up to Christmas has filled the days, leaving only the small hours to feed this unhealthy addiction!!
@mindshoot@kosmikus It really is the worst time of year to add a series of coding/logical challenges which get incrementally harder day on day to your plate, isn't it? :D
@aoanla@kosmikus honestly if I’d had any idea how much time it was going to soak up, I would never have started! I would consider just doing the first part each day next year, though. Or perhaps a crossword! 🤣
@mindshoot@kosmikus part of the problem is all the people who've been doing this since 2015 have a stack of "partial solutions to problems AoC likes to set", and they're spending 10 minutes just customising previous solutions to earlier years. If this is your first year (like both of us?), you're getting all the extra cost of having to solve the problem types for the first time each time.
@aoanla@kosmikus yes this is my first year too, and funny you should mention that - some of the people on the work leader board have GitHub repos and I can see those extra years. And their solutions often start by importing helpers as you describe. I had actually initially planned to use this as a chance to learn a new language (lisp) but that’s just a step too far for me now!
@mindshoot@aoanla It's the first year I'm really doing it as well, in all the previous years I've usually given up after just a day or two. Overall, yes, it's been costing time, but I'd say I've also been enjoying it and I've been learning quite a few things (using new libraries, writing algorithms I usually rarely end up writing), and the more annoying parts have been comparatively rare.
I would say that there's a danger though to let it become a massive time sink and not enjoying it at all anymore. It somewhat sounds like you may be in that situation. Don't let peer pressure get to you. I totally understand lack of time. If it becomes a chore, it's probably better to just let it be ...
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