The Poker challenge is a great mind-bender but I think it’s mislabeled on the python track as an Easy. If you look at other tracks like Go, the challenge is Medium (or above).
Should we look to re-classify the challenge from Easy to Medium?
It should but hopefully we’ll soon see an automated and better way of assigning difficulties. The current, manual way, is very tedious and error prone.
While there’s been much discussion on this topic lately, there’s also been much discussion on this over the past several years. I am unaware of any active plans by the Exercism team to implement anything along these lies. Are you aware of any plans to actually implement this?
@vaeng has done some interesting work on using start/iterations/completion statistics to re-asses difficulty levels for both C++ and Python.
However, much of this is clouded by the fact that prior to V3 (September of 2021, or thereabouts), the practice exercises were both gated by mentoring (mentor approval was needed to progress) and in an entirely different order based on a main “learning progression” vs “side exercises”. There was no learning mode, no online editor, no test runners, and all exercises had to be completed offline and uploaded.
Which is to say that some exercises weren’t very visible, due to them being side exercises – and others had lots of attempts because of mentoring (or other issues) that weren’t about difficulty level.
All that aside, we’ve re-tagged the difficulty of the Python exercises not once, but twice since the launch of V3. I am … not very interested right now in doing it again, considering all the other stuff we’ve got going.
Difficulty is both language-dependent and subjective. Reverse-string in Python? Very easy, if you know about reverse indexing. Reverse-string in C++? Different story entirely.
1 Like
Thanks folks, not wanting to add any more work than is already on the plate. We can leave this alone and focus on more important tasks!
2 Likes