Comment by deergomoo

> 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.