Hello.
I’m only providing feedback because apparently nobody else has…
The run-length-encoding exercise contains near-zero instructions,
unlike the exchange-rate exercise ( which is about the most-perfect lesson I’ve ever encountered, balancing instructions, hints, context, etc, all wonderfully ).
I’m an old geek, & am finally fighting-off the brain-injury which robbed me of math back in the 1980’s…
So, I’ve been trying learning programming off and on for decades, & that exercise took me 3 days to crack.
Labeling it “Easy” may make sense for a seasoned programmer who knows Julia, including regexes, occursin(), etc, & knows about having to do weird things with loops/iterators, etc, but there is no liklihood of that being given as a “next exercise” to beginners in programming, who’re trying to learn Julia to help them with high-school math ( which is where Julia should be given to kids, instead of spreadsheets ) finding that exercise to be somehow “fair” or at-similar-level.
I hope that the people who manage each of the Tracks can see the completed-rate for every single exercise, & that those statistics would make this obvious,
… but even that solution requires that those stats for the different exercises be periodically-reviewed, right?
Ideally, there should be an obstacle-detector in exercism, which identifies if an exercise is taking too long to crack for learners, OR if it simply isn’t getting completed reliably-enough, & that itself would flag it for review…
I’m not saying the run-length-encoding exercise is somehow inherently bad!
It’s a brilliant though tough exercise for me to have got…
but it absolutely is out-of-line as an “Easy” exercise, & doesn’t belong, in its current-form, near the beginning of the track.
Either provide enough instruction to make it fair to the learners, XOR move it … waaay towards the back of the set of lessons…
Oh, Exercism having every exercise link to the pertinent resources, including Wikipedia pages ( that exercise links to Wikipedia’s page on RLE ) AND to the Docs.Julialang.org ( or whatever that site is called ), as a standard block of resources, for every single exercise, getting people in the habit of digging into those, right up front, when tackling a problem, would be building-good-programming-habits in people who don’t have the experience to know that doing-that is important, right?
The habits set within the 1st 3 years of programming … are career-defining, or indellible.
They need to be made to be the best/most-effective ones possible!
( anything other-than-that is obliterating people’s life-potential for sake of … “tradition” or something?
Give the next generation the best & most-effective leverage they can have! : )
Thank you people very much for making Exercism have a Julia track, & populating it with interesting & useful means…
it is the one language that ought be given to all high-school kids, when they’re getting algebra, trig, & calculus…
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