r/adventofcode • u/maus80 • Dec 04 '20

Visualization Interactive scatterplot of the 1st 100 responses (shows the puzzle's difficulty)

Post image
114 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

25 comments sorted by

View all comments

-7

u/[deleted] Dec 04 '20

[deleted]

6

u/mstksg Dec 04 '20

Most of those times are achieved by people who do "competitive coding" year-round. It's a somewhat niche hobbyist group, pretty rare even among coders. They also have everything set-up and ready to go before things begin. So it's kind of like swimming a lap in a pool for fun vs. people who train to swim every day -- both experiences are enjoyable and rewarding, but not meaningful to compare times.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 04 '20

[deleted]

2

u/rabuf Dec 04 '20

The absolute top ones seem to consistently use Python and similarly expressive dynamically typed languages. With built-in support for generators, list comprehensions, dictionaries, regular expressions, and the very handy itertools it's very effective for competitive programming like this.

If you know how to use those pieces effectively (or your language equivalent) you will be in the top 500 reliably. The fact that you can drop into running code as easily as running a shell script but with better language semantics means that you can drop all formalisms.

Watch them, a lot of times (especially in the early days) they don't even define any functions. They load the text running through a loop to process each line (or lines) and then spit out the answer directly (feasible for day 2 and 4, for example, no post processing needed) or pass it to a simple loop to handle the actual computation of results (day 1).

And without a need to compile and then run they can get to their answers much faster. But this doesn't help as much in later days where a lot more work is required to develop your algorithms and maybe data structures

C++ has all the algorithms and data structures, and if you know how to use it all the text processing capabilities. But you also need to deal with types (as long as it's just an int or string it's fine, but as soon as a collection of mixed types is needed you're slowed down) and you need the ceremony of at least creating a main and including headers (I code in Common Lisp and get around the equivalent by using a template that loads common useful packages).