[deergomoo]

> You don't need a computer science background to participate - just a little programming knowledge and some problem solving skills will get you pretty far.

Every time I see this I wonder how many amateur/hobbyist programmers it sets up for disappointment. Unless your definition of “pretty far” is “a small number of the part ones”, it’s simply not true.

[duxup]

On sorta the same topic:

In the programming world I feel like there's a lot of info "for beginners" and a lot of folks / activities for experts.

But that middle ground world is strange... a lot of it is a combo of filling in "basics" and also touching more advanced topics at the same time and the amount of content and just activities filling that in seems very low. I get it though, the middle ground skilled audience is a great mix of what they do or do not know / can or can not solve.

I don't know if that made any sense.

[josephg]

This is also true of a lot of other disciplines. I’ve been learning filmmaking lately (and editing, colour science, etc). There’s functionally infinite beginner friendly videos online on anything you can imagine. But very little content that slowly teaches the fundamentals, or presents intermediate skills. It’s all “Here’s 5 pieces of gear you need!” “One trick that will make your lighting better”. But that’s mostly it. There’s almost no intermediate stuff. No 3 hour videos explaining in detail how to set up an interview properly. Stuff like that.

[Vinnl]

Makes sense that that's the case: there's usually a limited amount of beginner's knowledge, and then you get to the medium level by arbitrary combinations of that beginner's knowledge, of which there's an exponential number, making it less likely that someone has produced something about that specific combination. Then at the expert level, people can get real deep into some obscure nitty-gritty detail, and other experts will be able to generalise from that by themselves.

[joseda-hg]

It's one of the worst parts of being self taught, beginner level stuff has a large interest base because everyone can get into it.

Advanced level stuff usually gets recommended directly by experts or will be interesting to beginners too as a way of seeing the high level.

Mid level stuff doesn't have that wide appeal, the freshness in the mind of the experts, or the ease of getting into, so it's not usually worth it for creators if the main metric is reach/interest

Structured (taught) learning is better in this regard, it at least gives you structure to cling on to at the mid level

[ahoka]

Yes, and it's hard to point to reference material to newcomers. Hey, yeah that's actually a classic problem, let me show you some book about this... oh there's none. Maybe I should start creating them, but that is of course hard.

But also, the middle ground is often just years of practice.

[fifilura]

Middle level is where you pay with sweat.

[greener_grass]

CodeWars has a nice Kata grading system that features many intermediate level problems.

[macintux]

Someone else in the thread lamented the problems as "too easy" and I wondered what world I was living in.

[mattbillenstein]

Realize in anything, there are people who are much better than even the very best. The people doing official collegiate level competitive programming would find AoC problems pretty easy.

[alexfoo]

The group of people for which the problems are "too easy" is probably quite small.

According to Eric last year (https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/comments/1hly9dw/2024_...) there were 559 people that had obtained all 500 stars. I'm happy to be one of them.

The actual number is going to be higher as more people will have finished the puzzles since then, and many people may have finished all of the puzzles but split across more than one account.

Then again, I'm sure there's a reasonable number of people who have only completed certain puzzles because they found someone else's code on the AoC subreddit and ran that against their input, or got a huge hint from there without which they'd never solve it on their own. (To be clear, I don't mind the latter as it's just a trigger for someone to learn something they didn't know before, but just running someone else's code is not helping them if they don't dig into it further and understand how/why it works.)

There's definitely a certain specific set of knowledge areas that really helps solve AoC puzzles. It's a combination of classic Comp Sci theory (A*/SAT solvers, Dijkstra's algorithm, breadth/depth first searches, parsing, regex, string processing, data structures, dynamic programming, memoization, etc) and Mathematics (finite fields and modular arithmetic, Chinese Remainder Theorem, geometry, combinatorics, grids and coordinates, graph theory, etc).

Not many people have all those skills to the required level to find the majority of AoC "easy". There's no obvious common path to accruing this particular knowledge set. A traditional Comp Sci background may not provide all of the Mathematics required. A Mathematics background may leave you short on the Comp Sci theory front.

My own experience is unusual. I've got two separate bachelors degrees; one in Comp Sci and one in Mathematics with a 7 year gap between them, those degrees and 25+ years of doing software development as a job means I do find the vast majority of AoC quite easy, but not all of it, there are still some stinkers.

Being able to look at an AoC problem and think "There's some algorithm behind this, what is it?" is hugely helpful.

The "Slam Shuffle" problem (2019 day 22) was a classic example of this that sticks in my mind. The magnitude of the numbers involved in part 2 of that problem made it clear that a naive iteration approach was out of the question, so there had to be a more direct path to the answer.

As I write the code for part 1 of any problem I tend to think "What is the twist for part 2 going to be? How is Eric going to make it orders of magnitude harder?" Sometimes I even guess right, sometimes it's just plain evil.

[booleandilemma]

It's just bluffing, lying. People lie to make others think they're hot shit. It's like the guy in school who gets straight A's and says he never studies. Yeah I'll bet.

[alexfoo]

Got to agree. I'm even surprised at just how little progress many of my friends and ex-colleagues over the years make given that they hold down reasonable developer jobs.

[crystal_revenge]

My experience has been "little progress" is related to the fact that, while AoC is insanely fun, it always occurs during a time of year when I have the least free time.

Maybe when I was in college (if AoC had existed back then) I could have kept pace, but if part of your life is also running a household, then between wrapping up projects for work, finalizing various commitments I want wrapped up for the year, getting together with family and friends for various celebrations, and finally travel and/or preparing your own house for guests, I'm lucky if I have time to sit down with a cocktail and book the week before Christmas.

Seeing the format changed to 12 days makes me think this might be the first time in years I could seriously consider doing it (to completion).

[onion2k]

In order to complete AoC you need more than just the ability to write code and solve problems. You need to find abstract problem-solving motivating. A lot of people don't see the point in competing for social capital (internet points) or expending time and energy on problems that won't live on after they've completed them.

I have no evidence to say this, but I'd guess a lot more people give up on AoC because they don't want to put in the time needed than give up because they're not capable of progressing.

[ksenzee]

This type of problem has very little resemblance to the problems I solve professionally - I’m usually one level of abstraction up. If I run into something that requires anything even as complicated as a DAG it’s a good day.

[sethops1]

I think this has a lot more to do with time commitment. Once the problems take more than ~1 hour I tend to stop because I have stuff to do, like a job that already involves coding.

[TiredOfLife]

Because like 80% of AoC problems require deep Computer science background and deeply specific algorithms almost nobody is using in their day to day work.

[ryandv]

Why try any more? There are so many fucking frauds in this field.

[llmthrow0827]

It's totally true. I was doing Advent of Code before I had any training or work in programming at all, and a lot of it can be done with just thinking through the problem logically and using basic problem solving. If you can reason a word problem into what it's asking, then break it down into steps, you're 90% of the way there.

[ab5tract]

The statistics speak a far different story, I’m afraid.

[magimas]

mh, maybe it's cheating because it's still a STEM degree but I have a PhD in physics without any real computer science courses (obviously had computational physics courses etc. though) and I managed to 100% solve quite a few years without too much trouble. (though far away from the global leaderboard and with the last few days always taking several hours to solve)

[rts_cts]

I have a EE background not CS and haven't had too much trouble the last few years. I'm not aiming to be on the global leader board though. I think that with good problem solving skill, you should be able to push through the first 10 days most years. Some years were more front loaded though.

[gardenhedge]

Agreed. I have a CS background and years of experience but I don't get very far with these. At some point it becomes a very large time commitment as well which I don't have

[saberience]

Agreed. There is no "beginner" or amateur programmer who could complete even part of a single Advent of Code problem.

[alexfoo]

I disagree, the odd few are quite simple and can be done with pencil and paper.

https://adventofcode.com/2020/day/1 for example. It's not hard to do part 1 by hand.

You need two numbers from the input list (of 200 numbers) that add to 2020.

For each number n in the list you just have to check if (2020-n) is in the list.

A quick visual scan showed my input only had 9 numbers that were less than 1010, so I'd only have to consider 9 candidate numbers.

It would also be trivial for anyone who can do relatively simple things with a spreadsheet.

[alach11]

Usually the first day or two are readily solvable in Excel with just regular spreadsheet formulas.

[Peritract]

In general, the problems require less background knowledge than other coding puzzles. They're not always accessible without knowing a particular algorithm, but they're more 'can you think through a problem' than 'have you done this module'.

That's not the same as saying they're easy, but it's a different kind of barrier, and (in my opinion) more a test of 'can you think?' than 'did you do a CS degree?'

[eloisant]

The point is not that it's easy, but that you don't need much knowledge beyond knowing how to code.

In this sense it's accessible: you won't get stuck because of a word you don't understand or a concept you've never heard of.

[deergomoo]

> you won't get stuck because of a word you don't understand or a concept you've never heard of

I very much disagree here. To make any sort of progress in AoC, in my experience, you need at least:

- awareness of graphs and how to traverse them

- some knowledge of a pathfinding algorithm

- an understanding of memoisation and how it can be applied to make deeply recursive computations feasible

Those types of puzzle come up a lot, and it’s not anything close to what I’d expect someone with “just a little programming knowledge” to have.

Someone with just a little programming knowledge is probably good with branches and loops, some rudimentary OOP, and maybe knows when to use a list vs a map. They’re not gonna know much about other data structures or algorithms.

They could learn them on the go of course, but then that’s why I don’t think basic coding knowledge is enough.