I have been solving these since years, I find it a nice way of assessing a language and deep dive since it will cover lot of parts of what makes a language.
I have been porting my old solutions in other languages into Kotlin over the time, and will be again doing them in Kotlin. I find it a nice language for AOC since custom extensions and DSL possibilities, it has a good builtin libraries and you can always fallback on Java, even if it has some shortcomings.
Regarding the AOC per se, I take it as a fun daily challenge, I know I won't be able to be part of the top 100, at least I would with some luck during the first 3 days, and then.. nope, that's life, try not to be too competitive. Last year it took me 8 hours to solve day 20, but it's a game, you should have fun doing it (I had), if not people should stop.
However, I strive in trying to write pretty, compact, idiomatic and as functional as possible code, which means that sometimes I will write an ugly solution in 5 minutes, and will take an hour to make it beautiful.
Besides I like to read the story, I know plenty of friends who don't even read the adventures of Santa, they just solve the puzzle and that's it, they don't even know they saved Christmas :-D !
I have been porting my old solutions in other languages into Kotlin over the time, and will be again doing them in Kotlin. I find it a nice language for AOC since custom extensions and DSL possibilities, it has a good builtin libraries and you can always fallback on Java, even if it has some shortcomings.
Regarding the AOC per se, I take it as a fun daily challenge, I know I won't be able to be part of the top 100, at least I would with some luck during the first 3 days, and then.. nope, that's life, try not to be too competitive. Last year it took me 8 hours to solve day 20, but it's a game, you should have fun doing it (I had), if not people should stop.
However, I strive in trying to write pretty, compact, idiomatic and as functional as possible code, which means that sometimes I will write an ugly solution in 5 minutes, and will take an hour to make it beautiful.
Besides I like to read the story, I know plenty of friends who don't even read the adventures of Santa, they just solve the puzzle and that's it, they don't even know they saved Christmas :-D !