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Monk Coding Challenge 0: Prelude

code, mcc

Doing codingchallenges.fyi, but with a twist: each challenge must be developed in a different programming language

Intro

Well, hello there, dear reader! Welcome to the first blog post in the new series - Monk Coding Challenges. It’s been a while since I posted anything, but it’s not like anyone is actually reading blogs these days (except for the small group of my dearest friends; thank you, guys!)

Anyhow, let me give you a short intro to what this series will be about.

Monk Coding Challenges series

Recently, I stumbled upon CodingChallenges.FYI, a fantastic website run by John Crickett, where he posts coding challenges for people to sharpen their programming skills. Since I really like how challenges are structured, I thought of giving it a shot and using the opportunity to learn more about the programming languages theory. However, I decided to add a slight twist to the challenges - two additional rules:

  • Each challenge must be developed in a different programming language
  • Every chosen language must be Turing complete

Why?

I’m in a professional development phase where I like exploring different computational models, so I see this as an excellent chance to run some esoteric code through my fingers.

I want to evaluate each chosen language properly, so posts in this series will explain the language of choice, how a particular challenge is implemented, and finally, what my observations are regarding the language.

Of course, someone can say, “But you cannot evaluate the language just by developing a program from some coding challenges website; you need to spend years learning the language, patterns, idioms, and ecosystem.”, to which I could respond - “it’s my blog, I can do whatever I want” but I’m a professional, and I politely agree with expressed. Of course, language cannot be fully grasped just by developing a relatively simple program, but that is not my intention anyway. I aim to play with it by creating something non-trivial, slightly feeling the language, and sharing my impressions. That’s all.

Outro

Since I’m dying to start coding, I’d like to end this post here. Thank you for reading, and see you in the next edition of Monk Coding Challenges.

P.S. GitHub repository with solutions can be found here: https://github.com/shellmonk/monk-coding-challenges