[110jawefopiwa]

It's best for me when I do something that I ordinarily don't do for AoC.

I find no particular pleasure in using an everyday language like Python for it, because as you said it's too easy.

I have used Haskell, Racket, and in some easier cases APL and it's been fun. Treating it more like a puzzle than an actual programming assignment.

When learning new languages, it's best to do something that actually makes you think in a different shape. If you know Python, don't do Ruby. If you know Java, don't do C#.

[seba_dos1]

It goes into "too bothersome" territory in this case for me. Competing in a local leaderboard was fun and kept me engaged until the end, but it was only possible by choosing a comfortable language to be free to actually think about the puzzle itself to solve it fast. Choosing something that I'm not already familiar with (or that isn't well-suited for this type of tasks) is a great way to ramp up the difficulty and perhaps gain some bragging rights, but I can't see me doing it for longer than a few days before losing interest. Even in this "easy mode" in Python, there were four days that had me spend more than an hour (up to 5h) on the task. There's plenty of actually useful projects I could do in this time to learn new things instead after all.

[110jawefopiwa]

> There's plenty of actually useful projects I could do in this time to learn new things instead after all.

I suppose. I do actually useful projects at work. AoC reminds me of why I personally loved programming in the first place - solving small technical puzzles. I don't like trying to make every single moment of my life "productive".

[seba_dos1]

Who does?

When I said "useful", I meant "useful to me". I figure I'd prefer to solve some problem to scratch a personal itch, or play some instrument, or make a funny game, whatever. Even spending that time on resting would probably be useful. Solving a technical puzzle is nice, but my point was that collecting stars to finish the advent calendar isn't particularly useful or rewarding on its own, and if I need to be motivated internally to do it by adding some artificial challenges, then I can find more enjoyable ways to make myself busy as well.

But that's just me. I just don't think AoC could motivate me into learning something I wouldn't learn otherwise. It just doesn't provide enough incentive to keep going. Tasks are mostly too easy to be rewarding on their own, but some are too hard to just do casually. I can't imagine spending as much time as I did on it - about 30 hours in total, not counting time spent on golfing and browsing other people's solutions etc. - if I had a regular job at the time, and once you skip days it just becomes a random set of challenges that could be tackled at any time anyway.

[neonsunset]

C# allows for terser and very functional-y implementations thanks to differences between LINQ and Java’s Streams.

[110jawefopiwa]

I guess, but it's not really a fundamentally different programming paradigm, which is what I was getting at.

[neonsunset]

It doesn't do: partial application, currying, structurally constrained generics and gradual typing (and of course much more small details that e.g. F# can do)

It does do: higher order functions and functional composition, monads and monadic comprehensions, records, list comprehensions and iterators.

You are correct that it's not going to "push" you into that direction aside from APIs that are already popular, but it's unfortunate it keeps getting bundled together with Java. C# and Java are languages with differing priorities, paradigm support and target scenarios. There is great overlap, but the differences are significant.