| I look forward to Advent of Code every year. So far, I've used it as a way to learn new languages - I've done it in D, C#, Swift so far. I don't bother with the competition aspect, but I do have a few people that I bounce solutions off of. This year I'm taking a different approach though, I'm going to use it to re-learn an old language - UniVerse[0] Basic[1]. In my first IT job, I supported an in-house system that ran on UniVerse. I then moved on to working with a commercial system built on UniData[2] (a close cousin to UniVerse). These products mainly exist to allow Pick-style MultiValue applications to run on modern systems. They are closed-source commercial products, but there is a limited-use personal edition available. One nice thing about these is that they don't just emulate a Pick environment, they also give it features that Pick systems never had. For example, UniVerse Basic is capable of making HTTP/HTTPS requests, parsing XML and JSON, and at some point UniVerse Basic even gained the ability to interact with Python objects. One of the first things I built in preparation for this was a subroutine to retrieve the input data, downloading it and caching it if required. It's been about 10 years since I've worked with this technology, so I'm really looking forward to re-learning it. [0] https://www.rocketsoftware.com/products/rocket-universe-0/ro... [1] https://docs.rocketsoftware.com/nxt/gateway.dll/RKBnew20/uni... [2] https://www.rocketsoftware.com/products/rocket-unidata-0/roc... |