TL;DR

I completed Advent of Code 2021.

And it’s been a tumultuous ride!

A few things I learned (but there are others!):

• the word hell can be considered a profanity. This surprised me because the italian equivalent is not considered such, and I could not find any mention of this in Merriam-Webster. Interesting.
• I know of many algorithms, but I can’t say I know many algorithms. There’s been a lot of re-reading, which is fine anyway.
• Raku is fun and frustrating to use.
  • I still have to wrap my head around using basic data structures in the right way. I definitely missed the ease of Perl’s approach as in arrays flatten by default, use a reference if you don’t want to. The auto-boxing behavior still leaves me throwing .Slip, .flat and .List around, and too many times I added a .Array just to avoid being reminded that I can’t do this or that with a List. (My bad, anyway!)
  • I missed the ease of using dclone, although this is space for studying how to do this properly and easily in Raku.
  • It’s still relatively slow and this is not amazing when paired with poor algorithms and implementations 🙄
• When my program is being running for a good 30 minutes late at night, trying to refine solutions for a better one… I discovered myself just taking that last value and trying it as an answer. Think those movies where the timer is approaching 0 and they cut the red wire just because. (By the way… it worked and I went to sleep).

There’s still a (metric) ton to read and discover and learn… I’ll surely read through the solutions of the puzzles I found most frustrating, just after my hatrAHEManimosity against them wears off!

Whatever your culture… have a good day and stay safe!