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