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+<!--
+  -- +++
+  -- rss = "Doing Advent of Code in a new programming language each day"
+  -- date = Date(2022, 12, 26)
+  -- tags = ["fun", "exp"]
+  -- +++
+  -->
+
+# Advent of Programming Languages
+
+Earlier this year I enrolled in a master's programme[^master] at [UNIST]
+and joined the Programming Languages and Software Engineering lab (PLaSE) as
+a student researcher.  The stipend covers the school fees and living expenses,
+and I'm given *an* academic freedom to choose what to work on and take risks.
+I will review the life here in detail in another post, but (SPOILER ALERT!)
+overall I'm quite content with it.
+
+That being said, PLaSE is new and small, we only do research
+on software engineering and don't do its name justice.  Because of that,
+in the first year here I decided to do each day of [Advent of Code][^2021]
+in a language I'd never used in competitive programming (CP) before.
+
+![Pitbull holding the globe, captioned: Mr. Worldwide](/assets/mr-worldwide.jpg)
+
+Here was my blacklist going in, chronologically: Pascal, Python,
+Scheme, C, C++, Common Lisp, Lua, Raku, Go, Rust and Zig.  I am only
+proficient in over half of the listed languages, but dura lex, sed lex,
+I'd already had my CP first time with the rest.
+
+## Day One
+
+The first day should have been the warm up so I challenged myself
+with using POSIX utilities.  This is a bit irony though as the majority
+of my time spent outside of [*the* editor][Vim] or a web browser
+is inside a ([Bourn-again][Born Again]) shell.
+
+The [problem][p01] was indeed simple, involving only [finding the maxima
+among the sums of newline-separated numbers][s01].  I used [sed]\(1p)
+to turn the input into [dc]\(1) eypressions, and [sort]\(1p) and [tail]\(1p)
+for picking the largest sum.  Probably the most interesting part
+was that the summation was reusable to [grade an assignment] for a course
+I was a teaching assistant for.
+
+## Day Two
+
+The [second problem][p02] didn't ramp up much in difficulty.
+It only called for some rather [simple arithmetic][s02],
+and the input format regularity convinced me to finally give [Hare] a try.
+
+For just a taste, Hare is boring in a good way.  I was excited
+for the tagged union of [error which can include and propagate
+any debugging information][error], but unfortunately it wasn't needed
+for programs of such complexity (nor that errors are ever handled in CP).
+I'm looking forward to a chance to write more Hare in the future.
+
+## Day Three
+
+The [task for day 3][p03] was literally day $1 + 2$ in scope.
+I went for another *better C* that is [Nim].  My first impression with it
+wasn't positive: Nim insists on considering each source file as a model
+and does not allow hyphens in identifier name, so [filenames mustn't have
+any hyphen][hyphen] either.  This had led me to piping the source code
+to `nim c -` and executing `~/.cache/nim/stdinfile_d/stdinfile` to keep
+my solution naming convention.  `nim r -` wouldn't have worked either
+since the convention also consists of reading the input from stdin.
+
+On the bright side, [uniform function call syntax][UFCS], identifier
+case-(and underscore-)insensitivity and optional parentheses allowed me
+to [dodge parentheses in calls and camelCasing altogether][s03].
+Although I *love* Lisp and don't have any problem with brackets,
+I think their placement in ALGOL style hurts the readability
+of nested calls and [camelCase is just objectively bad][camelCase],
+pun[^obj] unintended.
+
+## Day Four
+
+The [forth problem][p04] wasn't any harder, only requiring
+[simple logic operations and summation][s04].  To save time,
+I opted for [Julia], which I was kinda sorta familiar with
+in building this site (at the time this is published at least).
+Like Nim, it has higher-order functions and a (reference) compiler
+capable of producing fast binaries.
+
+## Day Five
+
+The [next day's task][p05] was finally a breath of fresh air
+with [matrix parsing and LIFO (literal) stacks][s05].  It begged
+for a regular expression parser,[^re] hence I mined a tiny bit of Ruby
+for the task.  Ruby had been designed to be an object-oriented Perl,
+and expectedly it feels very similar to Raku.  To an extend, I was also
+able to avoid ALGOL-style call do quite a [Lisp impression].
+
+When I was looking for a second language to learn after the peak
+of my CP *career* in middle school, I was choosing between those
+with garbage-collection that are most popularly used in [free software]
+at the time, namely Perl, Python and Ruby.  Perl was ruled out due to my fear
+of [sigils] and I picked up Python as I didn't want to be a [weeaboo].
+Sometimes I wonder how my side projects would have turned out to be
+had I chosen differently.
+
+## Day Six
+
+Bit set and byte queue in D
+
+poor docs
+
+no hyphen
+
+## Day Seven
+
+Janet PEG parse console log
+
+## Day Eight
+
+2D dynamic programming in Fortran
+hardcoded size
+
+## Day Nine
+
+Tcl with hash table
+
+## Day Ten
+
+AWK w/o loop
+
+## May Day
+
+[Oops!… I did it again.][^2021]  If you think because I published this
+right after Christmas it must be a complete advent journal, I have played you
+for absolute fools!  The later problems were increasingly parsing heavy,
+and while I still had languages I wanted to try, none left was designed
+for text processing.  I was also busy in meatspace at the time thus I couldn't
+find the time to write byte-level parsers in languages I didn't know.
+
+[^master]: No, I have not been given any slave.
+[^2021]: I know, last year I already quit citing how janky later problems were.
+[^obj]: camelCase was popularized by mainstream object oriented languages.
+[^re]: Not really, reading byte-by-byte would also work, just less cool.
+
+[UNIST]: https://unist.ac.kr
+[Advent of Code]: https://adventofcode.com
+[Vim]: https://www.vim.org
+[Born Again]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5E6CExu204
+
+[p01]: https://adventofcode.com/2022/day/1
+[s01]: https://git.sr.ht/~cnx/cp/commit/ff0bb53c15dd
+[sed]: https://www.unix.com/man-page/posix/1p/sed
+[dc]: https://linux.die.net/man/1/dc
+[sort]: https://www.unix.com/man-page/posix/1p/sort
+[tail]: https://www.unix.com/man-page/posix/1p/tail
+[grade an assignment]: https://larkspur.one/notice/AQALVP69wAiotsVmgC
+
+[p02]: https://adventofcode.com/2022/day/2
+[s02]: https://git.sr.ht/~cnx/cp/commit/ada3a69b15ff
+[Hare]: https://harelang.org
+[error]: https://harelang.org/tutorials/introduction/#defining-new-error-types
+
+[p03]: https://adventofcode.com/2022/day/3
+[s03]: https://git.sr.ht/~cnx/cp/commit/eeb9a45346a8
+[Nim]: https://nim-lang.org
+[hyphen]: https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/5024
+[UFCS]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Function_Call_Syntax
+[camelCase]: http://www.cs.kent.edu/~jmaletic/papers/ICPC2010-CamelCaseUnderScoreClouds.pdf
+
+[p04]: https://adventofcode.com/2022/day/4
+[s04]: https://git.sr.ht/~cnx/cp/commit/8941f621840f
+[Julia]: https://julialang.org
+
+[p05]: https://adventofcode.com/2022/day/5
+[s05]: https://git.sr.ht/~cnx/cp/commit/aa7616140a8b
+[Lisp impression]: https://www.codesections.com/blog/raku-lisp-impression
+[free software]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
+[sigils]: https://raku-advent.blog/2022/12/20/sigils
+[weeaboo]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanophilia#21st_century
+
+[p06]: https://adventofcode.com/2022/day/6
+[s06]: https://git.sr.ht/~cnx/cp/commit/
+
+[p07]: https://adventofcode.com/2022/day/7
+[s07]: https://git.sr.ht/~cnx/cp/commit/
+
+[p08]: https://adventofcode.com/2022/day/8
+[s08]: https://git.sr.ht/~cnx/cp/commit/
+
+[p09]: https://adventofcode.com/2022/day/9
+[s09]: https://git.sr.ht/~cnx/cp/commit/
+
+[p10]: https://adventofcode.com/2022/day/10
+[s10]: https://git.sr.ht/~cnx/cp/commit/
+
+[Oops!… I did it again.]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oops!..._I_Did_It_Again_(album)