Hi everyone! I was searching for a practice and learning platform when I discovered https://exercism.org. This has been a great site for a refresher for C++ and for allowing me to practice some of the more modern C++ skills and idioms.
After the practice problems, I started building the problems locally, and also trying to use Git to keep track of my changes.
When browsing through various submissions, and even the submissions of whoever created the exercises, I see a distinct lack of comments. Of course, most comments should be unnecessary, but sometimes they can add value in a learning environment.
One thing that I think would be interesting to see is a comment for each iteration or submission, kind of like a git commit message. That way we users can see what changes or thought processes were in play when a new iteration was created, plus it would help newer users get used to committing new iterations, such as in a version control environment.
Just a thought, for now I will put a comment into my own source for the reason for subsequent iterations if I have another idea.
Again, kudos for what you have built! I look forward to contributing more and even becoming an insider
Hello. Really glad you’re enjoying it and thanks for the idea!
We had this feature in v2 of Exercism and pretty much no-one used it. When I came across people that had I really liked that, but sadly it was extremely rare. So we removed it in v3.
There is no reason that you would not be able to do this in the iteration itself. Even add a ‘notes.md’ file if you would want to submit it, along side your solution for the iteration.
You can do this by doing exercism submit exercise.ext notes.md and it should keep the notes not primary in the viewing of the exercise for yourself and other people.
That is a great idea, thanks! I will definitely consider that, along with code comments, going forward.
That is a shame that no one used it. So long as I am doing problems locally (I will still sometimes do them in the editor) then I will keep practicing using Git as well.
I usually use git notes add for each iteration, and I keep the discussions locally, and they push to remotes if you tell git to. So it is a way that I help ensure I still have information available even if I do not have internet or if for some reason Exercism is just not available for the time being.
Attached information is going to be knowing what git prune prunes, as you would not want to lose the notes, presumably. In some projects, I freely lose the notes (in the repository), in others I preserve them carefully in the repository itself.
