Bob, the lackadaisical teenager

Programming Julia
1

Hi colleaques again,

I’m having a problem with
bob, the lackadaisical teenager
I’ve solved 33 of 34 tests
only the one:
“Okay if like my spacebar quite a bit?”
doesnt’ work in the exercism test but works in the REPL
So I guess that there might be a problem with the function call.
I would like you to check whether there is a syntax error.

thanks for that in advance,

Nisang

2

Oh, I just found that I can see all the tests before solving…
will check that right away!

3

How are you running your code in the REPL? Are you using the tests Exercism provides? If you’re pasting in the tests from the browser to your REPL, you need to be careful that you’re not changing the value being tested.

4

It took me ages to solve this exercise as there were:

  • an unforeseeable behaviour of the teenager answering to smiles and so on
  • so many test cases which were very hard to see in advance like usage of digits
  • usage of sentences without any letter

I want to suggest to change it’s difficulty level to at least medium

5

In general, there is little agreement when setting difficulty. It is too subjective, and too dependent on programming background.

I ran a quick check on a subset of tracks, to see how they rate Bob. These are from the config.json, and the Exercism website translates the numbers 1-3 as easy and 4-6 as medium. The average is 2.6, so Julia (a 2) is not wildly out of line. The variance is remarkably high, and not correlated to my personal perception of language difficulty. I love F# (a 1), but not because I think it is much easier than Ruby (a 5)!

track difficulty
ballerina 3
c 5
cpp 5
crystal 1
csharp 4
elixir 3
fsharp 1
futhark 4
gleam 3
javascript 4
julia 2
kotlin 2
nim 1
ocaml 3
python 1
r 2
ruby 5
scala 1
sml 2
vlang 1
wren 2
zig 3
1 Like
6

Also FYI, Bob is perhaps the oldest exercise we have. Katrina Owen (Exercism co-founder) gave an entire conference talk about it more than a decade ago. I can’t currently find a link to the video, but I think it’s on YouTube.

7

I’d recommend reading over What is Test-Driven Development? | Exercism's Docs if you haven’t already. It seems the issue may have been a mismatch between your expectations and what Exercism aims to do. The tests are intended to be worked through one by one so you shouldn’t be tackling more than one at a time.

8

It’s called “Overkill”.

1 Like
9

thanks Andras,

how do you mean this?

10

Dear Collin,

thanks for admiting that…

and also for replying in such a detailed way…
which makes me feel satisfied.

I finally solved the exercise…
and found a very interesting phenomenon which I will report separately!
it is about different behaviour in the REPL and the Test-Driven Development.

and, yes I will have a look at the talk Katrinas.

have a good time

Nisang

11

no, I did’nt,
this is a good idea, because to think in advance seems to be more difficult but saves a lot trouble afterwards.
Nevertheless I’m proud to found 12 tests solved with only one change in my code… so it finally worked.!

1 Like