Hi, I’m on the Rust track. I wanted to learn about lifetimes. I thought that this issue is not covered, as it doesn’t appear as a concept in the syllabus.
However, by chance I looked at the config.json file, and saw that exercises have a list of “topics”, one of which is lifetimes. So if I had seen the topics covered by each exercise, I could have chosen exercises which deal with this topic.
Right now, I don’t see any mention of those topics anywhere on the site.
Thanks for the good work, I’m enjoying exercism a lot!
Noam
Hi Noam,
Topics are a deprecated feature. They were used in Exercism v3, but have been replaced with the prerequisites and practices fields, which list concepts. The reason why you’re still seeing some track have topics in their config.json is to allow them to use them as inspiration when specifying an exercise’s prerequisites/practices fields.
1 Like
It would be great to show which concepts an exercise falls under. Currently the only way I see is to go to the Learn tab and hunt-and-peck. Works OK if you have just one exercise in progress, but it would still be nicer if it were present on the exercise’s page itself.
For example, Pig Latin on the Elixir track falls under both Strings and Binaries. The advantage of seeing this would be to know that the intention isn’t to practice solving it with a regex-based approach. By contrast, Acronym does fall under the Regular Expressions concept, so there one gets the hint.
They do appear when you mark an exercise complete, but it’s too late for intentions by then. Maybe the exercise-complete popup could be enhanced with “and here are the remaining exercises in each of those concepts” so you can click one to directly continue your path in that direction.