Circular Buffer: Required in 2 weeks. This is a common problem, and quite easy to do. The problem spec provides more than just test data, you need to interpret and respect that
Zebra Puzzle: Required in May. This is very easy on the test side, but hard for the example.php (possibly idiomatic solution, required for CI)
Spiral Matrix: Required in July. This looks easy on the test side, but may have hurdles for the example.php (possibly idiomatic solution, required for CI)
The following is missing, too, but I think it is not “easy enough” to start with. I have no idea how to implement that…
Parallel Letter Frequency: Required in 3 weeks. This is hard in any part, as PHP has no built-in support for real parallel processing. Just implementing it synchronously fails the purpose
For practice exercises, I see the example file not as the idiomatic exemplar, but as a proof that the exercise can be solved. Other maintainers may have a different perspective.
You may choose to forego the exercise in the track’s config.json.
A common rationale I’ve seen for making the CI example idiomatic is sometimes a student looks it up while looking for other solutions. That would indicate to me there aren’t enough community solutions yet so when porting exercises, I often publish my CI example polished up.
Just to confirm: the sole purpose of the example file is to verify that the exercise can be solved. Nothing more, nothing less. Maintainers are of course free to have the example be idiomatic, but it’s not required by any means.
Thanks. I’ll see if I can find the time to solve one of them. I cannot do the one needed in two weeks, that I know for sure, but perhaps the one in May.
I’ll soon have a first draft of the Zebra Exercise, should I go ahead and make a PR?
Questions/Updates
Another question. Would it be OK, that I make a PR that adds .idea to .gitignore? Currently, I have to ensure manually that I don’t commit it by accident. I cannot do it globally (local) as I have projects where I need to commit it.
Would it be ok, if we sort the config.json alphabetically? It would be easier to avoid merge conflicts.
Please, do so. I don’t see any problem with excluding common tooling files or temporary folders.
No, we can’t. The order in config.json is the order in which the exercises appear in the exercise list. One day we may order them by difficulty (or theme or paradigm), but for sure not alphabetically. And configlet also has its opinion about order.
