Hi all!
I’m wondering if the exercise ordering on the Rust track is intentional: it very quickly moves to exercises tagged “hard” and doesn’t seem to have a “logical” order to it.
Is there a way to re-order exercises in order to have students progress more naturally? This may be due to the upcoming syllabus I read about in other posts, but I’d still suggest at least ordering by level if we don’t want to spend much time on this ;-)
Thanks!
I’m not a track maintainer but I’m guessing there’s a good chance it’s not intentional. It might be in the order exercises were added.
The order is set by the order in the config.json file. You can sort json files using jq and sort_by(). It’s generally a good idea to get track maintainer sign off before opening a PR.
+cc @senekor
I think the previous maintainers made the order intentional. I sometimes read old PRs and commit messages that talk about exercise order. There was no overlap between them and me contributing, so I can’t say much with certainty. But I’m hesitant to crudely sort by the difficulty number.
There have been a few exercises added since the previous maintainers left that are easy, just appended at the end, which is probably not optimal. I think it could be good to move them upwards in the list. That wouldn’t be a destructive thing.
But it’s also true that there are hard exercises too early in the list. This is puzzling to me, I don’t remember it being the case when I went through the track. The syllabus was still active at the time, that probably made a difference with the order of unlocked exercises.
I don’t want to automatically sort, but some manual, conservative tweaks seem in order. @chezwicker would you like to work on a PR? I will do it myself otherwise, I just don’t know when I’ll get around to it. Either way, thanks for the report!
Completion percentage as mentioned on the build page can be a very useful tool too: Rust impact and status on Exercism
@senekor : thanks for the follow-up! I’ve just gotten into rust, so I’m not sure I’d be the best suited to come up with a sensible order. Is there something like a concept mapping which shows which exercises require understanding of which concepts? If so, could that be something that could inform a sensible order? I guess the syllabus will use something like that as well, no?
Happy to help in any way I can, but to actually come up with a suitable order, I think i’d have to solve quite a few more exercises first. I guess if there’s a new suggested order, I could go through exercises that way and see what I’m missing and feed that back so we could see if there’s an exercise that would have taught me that?
That’s totally fine. I’ll do it myself when I get around to it. I don’t think it’s necessary to put a huge amount of effort into this, 80/20 rule should apply. Once there is a renewed effort for a syllabus, more effort makes sense. For the moment, I’ll just move the few outliers around so there’s nothing that obviously doesn’t make sense.
At the end of the day, there are over 100 exercises and people are different. If there are many easy ones at the beginning, some people may want to skip them. If the exercises are completely mixed up, people who want to take it slow can go cherry-pick the easy ones.
Still, it simply doesn’t make sense to have the macros exercise that early in the list and eliuds-eggs at the very end. I’ll fix that.
Thanks you!