Some marked Easy maybe not so easy?

Programming Bash
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After having worked through all of the “Easy” and some of the “Medium” difficulty problems in the Bash track. Maybe it’s just that my skills have improved, but my general feeling is that some of the “Easy” problems are decidedly more difficult or trickier than many of the “Medium” problems so far.

“Matching Brackets” is one that I found particularly tricky and wonder if deserves to be categorized as “Medium”. But maybe that was just me… curious if others have had the same experience? Or if there are other “Easy” problems that seemed more difficult.

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Setting difficulties is notoriously … difficult.

  • Difficulties are very subjective.
  • There are many aspects/elements that go into making an exercise challenging. Different people find different aspects harder or easier.
  • If you know the “trick” to solving matching brackets, it’s actually quite easy. If you don’t know the trick, it can be challenging. Does that make it easy or not easy?

Matching brackets is given a difficulty of 3, on par with Prime Factors, Resistor Color Trio and Rotational Cipher, which all feel ballpark similar difficulty to me. Darts and Nucleotide Count are also marked 3 but feel easier to me. 4 includes Binary Search, Pig Latin and Roman Numerals which feel harder than Matching Brackets, suggesting 3 might be reasonable.

If you want to complete most of the easy and medium exercises then suggest new values, we’re also open to input!

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I think it’s part of the problem, that there are actually 3 levels of each (“easy” 1-3, “medium” 4-6 and “hard” 7-9) - but the UI only shows those coarse names at all.

I also have a bad night every time I think about re-evaluating the difficulties of exercises. You cannot do it right…

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I also appreciate the feedback. I wrote that exercise 7 years ago. I can see, even from the example solution, that some more advanced bash features get used.

This is a funny exercise though: there are tracks that rate it a 1 and some that rate it as 8. The average is about 4.3, so bash is on the low side.

I would like to echo Isaac’s request: please track how you would rate the exercises as you go, and come back to report your findings.

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For sure, totally get that difficulty is subjective. I’ll reply if I find any more that feel like outliers. Thanks!