Cutting the mention of how many codons there are

Exercism Support
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@BNAndras proposed deleting the mention in the protein-translation exercise of there being more codons than are used in the exercise. The main reasons were:

  1. Relevance (@IsaacG disagreed)
  2. Clarity (can distract/confuse from the actual task)
  3. Compatibility with some tracks that have modified the exercise to cover all codons after all

The other codons are out of scope. We are giving the student a table of the canonical test data codons as a reference so that should be enough. Plus it makes appends tricky if tracks want to add additional codons. Rust and Cairo did that, and it would be confusing for the instructions to mention not using additional codons, then provide a table, and then say more are being used on this track. The first thing seemingly contradicts the last thing.

I’ve also had a mentoring discussion recently where a student misunderstood the sentence as a suggested challenge.

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Rather than dropping it entirely, I would mention that there exists 64 codons but the table is incomplete, and that the solution only needs to implement those required by the tests.

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That works for me.

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The current proposal is “There are 64 codons which in turn correspond to 20 amino acids; however, not all codons will be used in this exercise. Below are the codons and resulting amino acids needed for the exercise.” It mentions the three things you cited: There are 64, implies the table is incomplete (“below are [those] needed” after “not all codons will be used”), and the last sentence already does what you say.

So in the context of the current proposal, I guess this thread’s conclusion is simply a “no change” and can be closed?

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