Comment by 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.
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.
> 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.