It’s been a while, but we’re back for week 8. This week’s challenge is to write a Circular Buffer. It’s basically a first in, first out data structure with the limitation that there’s only $n$ slots for data. It took me a while to get around to this because of having to do a bunch more elixir learning track exercises, and also because I’ve been on holiday. The selection of languages available for this exercise were kind of limited, so I’ve had to branch out into using web assembly for this one. Read more

Week 7 sees us take on the challenge of turning a string into an acronym. If we’re being picky, these are mostly initialisms rather than acronyms because they don’t spell a word. And in a break with tradition, I actually took three fairly different approaches to solving this problem in the three languages I tried. In fact, I also tried doing this exercise in PowerShell (because I had ambitions to go for the gold medal of doing Haskell, PowerShell and TCL). Read more

This week’s1 challenge was List Ops: create methods for manipulating lists like map, filter and reduce (well, foldr and foldl). I found this exercise frustrating in different languages in different ways. I used bash, elixir and haskell. In elixir and haskell, the frustration was that the exercise required me to return the standard list objects. I think it would have been more fun and more interesting to actually create a new list type and implement the methods there. Read more

Week 5 of 48 in 24! This time around we’re doing Protein Translation. Basically, take a sequence of amino acids and translate that into a list of proteins. Each triple of amino acids – a codon – gets mapped to a protein. Or rather, some codons are valid proteins, some represent a “stop” signal, and others are garbage and should throw an error. Bash The first language I thought I’d try this week is bash. Read more

I’m now well over a week behind with these challenges, so it’s Thursday of week 5, but we’re just finishing up week 4. Part of the issue is I’m quite bust, but part of the issue is that I am trying to use this as an opportunity to learn elixir, and I’m doing the elixir learning track. This means that the exercises are locked until I do the relevant learning exercises that teach the concepts. Read more