Ask HN: Which language for Advent of Code in 2024?
18 points by usgroup a day ago | 20 comments
I’ve considered Mercury and Picat this year but I don’t want to go without regex and/or associative arrays. Also Mercury seems moreso about performance than semantics.

I think it’s Prolog for me again this year but with an effort to complete the problems in a more “Prologesque” way.

  • mlhpdx a day ago |
    C# again. I aspire to get back to C++ but this isn’t the year for me.
  • gardenhedge 21 hours ago |
    Typescript for me, although I only ever do the first few days. I don't have the time to spend on it after that.
    • pavel_lishin 20 hours ago |
      Yep.

      I like the puzzle-solving aspect of it - like doing Sudoku, or Alphaguess - but I don't particularly have the time in my life right now to use AoC to learn a new language. (The last time was approximately 6 years ago, when I was learning Elixir - which was also for work. It was also when my child was young enough that I had spare time after her bedtime, but not so young that she didn't sleep through teh night.)

  • neonsunset 21 hours ago |
    Will be doing it in F# this year. Last year I did C#/Rust split until real life took over and they ended up being too similar to each other at solving AoC type of challenges.
    • hack_fraud13 17 hours ago |
      F# sounds fun, I’ve been goofing off with Haskell in my spare time and really liking how it handles parsing problems. I’d think F# would be elegant for AOC too
  • sargstuff 18 hours ago |
    ?? turn <language of choice> into api over prolog ??
  • cdaringe 18 hours ago |
    I’m ready to give zig another try.

    gleam was a lot of fun last year, for those who are gleam curious.

    For those who are doing something like protocol hackers, instead of adventure code, ocaml 5+ with effects was super fun

  • tonyedgecombe 13 hours ago |
    Last year I had just started learning Rust so used that. That turned out to be a mistake, I was spending most of my time figuring out what the borrow checker was complaining about rather than looking at the actual problems.

    Hopefully that's behind me now so I will use Rust again.

    • usgroup 11 hours ago |
      That sounds about right if your aim was to learn the language. I had the same experience with Prolog.
  • joshagilend 13 hours ago |
    math :)
  • croo 12 hours ago |
    Python. I want to focus on having fun with the puzzles instead of decrypting unfamiliar syntax errors.
  • GeneralMaximus 12 hours ago |
    I watched somebody on YouTube solve some AoC problems in Excel, so I’m going to try that this year. Not sure how far I’m going to get, but it’ll be a fun challenge!
    • usgroup 11 hours ago |
      I’ve been tempted in that direction too. Or using something like “Forth”. Both strike me as a “solve AoC with an abacus” style approaches, requiring bigger levels of problem understanding.
  • haakonhr 11 hours ago |
    I didn't do it last year, but the years before I used Racket and Common Lisp. I might try Common Lisp again since I really want to rediscover the experience of programming w/ Sly (a fork of SLIME).

    I'm also considering trying to solve everything with Z3.

  • Leftium 9 hours ago |
    https://github.com/betaveros/noulith

    Designing a programming language to speedrun Advent of Code: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/38255808

    > I did not design and implement a programming language for the sole or even primary purpose of leaderboarding on Advent of Code. It just turned out that the programming language I was working on fit the task remarkably well.

    -- "betaveros, the guy who won 1st place in Advent of Code every single year since 2019"

    • satvikpendem 2 hours ago |
      Good post, just read it. Just curious, why did you link that site (presumably your own, based on your username?) instead of simply linking Hacker News?
  • Sateeshm 7 hours ago |
    Typescript because that's all I know.
  • johnofthesea 7 hours ago |
    This year I will go with Nushell.

    (Maybe will cheat with making Nushell plugin in Rust).

  • hulitu 4 hours ago |
    BASIC. In memoriam
  • Jtsummers an hour ago |
    I used Common Lisp as my primary language for 2015-2022 and Python for 2023. I've used a few other languages along the way, in parallel to my main effort: Rust, Ada, Python, C++.

    I'll probably just use Python this year, so many things are "baked in" to the language that it's the most straightforward. Only downside really is performance, but if you need high performance compiled code for Advent of Code problems you've generally not solved the problem efficiently.