Apologies for mentioning difficulty levels again

In case there is anyone out there who still thinks all the tracks have these sorted out:

  • Bob in Fortran is listed as difficulty 1.

Cue manic laughter from anyone who recently finished this exercise…

All the Fortran exercises are listed as easy. I think the track maintainers haven’t yet set difficulties and used 1 as the default.

» jq '.exercises.practice[].difficulty' config.json  | sort | uniq -c
     23 1
      2 2
      3 3

Perhaps you could help out by suggesting what the difficulties should be.

Fair point. I’ve only done 6 exercises on this track (beyond hello-world), but I’ll look back at the code and at least rank them.

One problem with ranking exercises halfway through the track is that you may have only solved the simpler ones which skews the scale terribly. If you work through most of the track (and continuously update difficulty rankings), that tends to paint a much better picture!

Mmmm…

I’m only a quarter way through the 28 Fortran exercises. Doing the other 21 is probably not my most urgent priority at the moment, I’m afraid.

I had a lot of fun writing Fortran back in the mid-70’s. Not so much recently, to be honest.

Most of the current Fortran users I know assume that grad students are cheap, super-computing clusters are very expensive. Getting highly optimized code written is easier if you can delegate it to someone who knows that this is an essential hurdle to clear before they can get their PhD!

Cynical? No - I think anyone who has done a doctorate will recognize the pattern!

Does this not look like the intention was to mark 2 exercises as Medium and 3 as Hard?

Without looking at the PRs and possibly beyond, it can be challenging to figure out the intent here. That’s certainly a possibility! But I just looked at the config, and in the config, the difficulty is out of 10.