Comment by unkulunkulu
3 months ago
The most fun on this site is solving a problem and then having your mind blown by solutions in Apl/j/k and trying to guess what they mean without knowing anything about those languages
3 months ago
The most fun on this site is solving a problem and then having your mind blown by solutions in Apl/j/k and trying to guess what they mean without knowing anything about those languages
Even better than the crazy languages, is seeing some fundamental math used to prevent having to do a ridiculously expensive search.
That said, raw brute force often did far better than you'd like to admit.
The biggest thing I learned from PE was that neither elegant theory nor brute force had a monopoly on successful optimization strategies. It's been something I've carried with me ever since and has over and over again proven its value.
A real gem of a resource.
I've solved about a hundred PE problems in Livecode, maybe 40 in Python, and about 20 in J. I highly recommend giving it a try in a language you don't know, it's fun! Especially with something as obscure as J.
See also Uiua, a newcomer to the "extremely cool but completely incomprehensible language" family!
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