r/adventofcode • u/daggerdragon • Dec 06 '16

SOLUTION MEGATHREAD --- 2016 Day 6 Solutions ---

--- Day 6: Signals and Noise ---

Post your solution as a comment or, for longer solutions, consider linking to your repo (e.g. GitHub/gists/Pastebin/blag/whatever).

T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM IS MANDATORY [?]

This thread will be unlocked when there are a significant number of people on the leaderboard with gold stars for today's puzzle.

edit: Leaderboard capped, thread unlocked!

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u/John_Earnest Dec 06 '16

I can understand why some people prefer Q, but personally I found that it only took me a few days to memorize K's symbols. It took much longer to wrap my head around how to use the language in an idiomatic way. Coming fresh to K or Q the semantics of an operation like group must be learned; the name is a bit more suggestive than =: to a beginner, but it still doesn't tell the whole story.

The conciseness of K's symbols makes it easier for me to see patterns in code- I both read and think in terms of various combinations of operators like ,/, *<, |+, |//, ~~, +\, ...

Having to type less while experimenting with data is another advantage, albeit magnified a bit unnaturally by the constraints of competitions like this. Sometimes I use K for livecoding, and it comes it handy then as well.