I think that it would be good sometimes to get mentoring during an exercise like when one gets stuck on some detail that might be hard to get past.
Taking on Ocaml for example, from a C++ background, the compiler errors one gets can be quite confusing and one could need a bit of pointers in the right direction just to get going with the coding itself.
As an example I now sit with some code that compiles and runs on TryOcaml but does not compile on Exercism. It is probably something elementary regarding modules but so far I have no clue what it might be. (I don’t want help here, just posting this as an example.)
For what it’s worth: you cannot submit faulty solutions through the web editor, but you can submit them through the CLI. That way, you can request mentoring even for partial solutions.
As of last week you can also unlock Community Solutions (and Dig Deeper when available) if you get stuck, which enables you get an idea for how others are solving things.
The “official” way to get support on an uncompleted exercise is now through this forum. We might enable mentoring in the future for people who normally solve exercises but have got stuck, but we want to explore the forum as a solution first.
I suppose then one should, in my case, go to the Ocaml conversation in the Programming category, right?
I know one can unlock Community Solutions. In fact I’m so new here I never knew one could not . (I did for #3 as I did not realize I should try to figure out the interface of my implementation from the tests). Generally sneak peaking there give me a bit too much of the solution when all I need is to be able to build the code to pass the first test before I actually go for solving the problem.
Doing it through the forum is probably a good idea though as it might be that many newbies encounter similar or the same problems.