Advent of Code will make you a better developer

▤ Summary

This day sparked a fair bit of discussion in our Slack channel, and we bounced various ideas back and forth, some of which included looking for repeating patterns which could remove the need for performing the full set of iterations. Back in the olden days, when the average computer would have been eclipsed by even the most basic phone of today, there was little choice in the matter: if you wanted any heavy workload to complete in any semblance of reasonable time, you had better make sure that your code was performant. Here’s yet another Cygnian’s solution for day 10, which also substitutes the memoizing approach outlined above for a reversed traversal: Specific language features can offer shortcuts which sometimes border on “cheating”, by way of offloading some otherwise more or less complex logic to the compiler or runtime environment. Sometimes it’s simply not worth porting a solution to a language where it is no longer idiomatic, if the readability suffers so much that you -- or your team mates, present or future -- have trouble understanding and maintaining it, even if it may in fact be more efficient. For the 2019 event I made an attempt to use as many languages and environments as possible, and (with some generous interpretation of differences) ended up with twelve separate paths, including bygone ones like Turbo Pascal and 16-bit DOS-based x86 assembly, just for the heck of it.

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