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Comment by blastonico | Hacker News Reader

This is my first advent of code, my initial goal was solving the challenges using APL (note: I've never used that kind of language). It didn't work. :D

I continued in C++, but kind of lost interest. Next year I'll learn the language beforehand. hehe

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I struggled with APL last year. This year I’ve been enjoying trying to solve the problems in uiua (“wee-wha”). It’s a symbol-based array language like APL, with a wonderful online editor and code formatter (also command line), that formats on each run, and lets you type in English keywords that it converts into symbols, so you don’t have to hunt and peck through the virtual keyboard or remember a bunch of arbitrary chords.

There’s a decent VSCode plugin but I mostly use the online pad because it’s such a rich environment. Very active Discord, with an AoC channel for help and sharing solutions - the maintainer actively iterates on the language to help them solve AoC problems.

https://www.uiua.org/

(I also fall back to Clojure when I’m struggling to come up with a uiua solution or banging my head against the stack, I kinda wish I had uiua-in-Clojure like how April is APL-in-CL)

Thank you for the hint, I didn't know Uiua. I'll definitely take a look on it.

I tried the same thing with Haskell one year with a similar result (fell back to python then gave up). The beginning was nice when the puzzles were easy and I could focus on learning the language, but once the puzzles got tough it was too much trying to struggle with them and the language at the same time.

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