I first joined Exercism to learn specific languages (Julia, Rust). I’m similarly unsure how to turn that into a challenge.
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Mostly building and mentoring.
It would be great to encourage people to get involved, but a monthly challenge is not the right way to do it: I’d foresee lots of nuisance(*) PRs and insincere mentoring sessions just to get a badge.
IMO the contributing side of Exercism is intrinsically self-rewarding, although reputation points are fun.
(*) Maybe “nuisance” is harsh. Perhaps “well-intentioned but ill-informed”.
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I enjoy learning new things. So maybe concept exercises, where I can see a path to a goal, which is easy to quantify.
I also like a challenge, like Advent of Code. A crossover would be cool :)
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Earning badges 
it turns out I’m very badge motivated.
Seriously though, I think broadly Exercism is at its best when it’s encouraging users to go either deep (tons of exercises in a few languages) or wide (a few exercises in a lot of languages).
Comparing 12in23 vs 48in24, I personally got a lot more out of the former than the latter. Picking 1 language / month from a small pool felt more guided and supported than having a huge selection (I like Exercism and programming languages, but I’m not trying to solve puzzles in 70 languages). So, I stuck with Rust the whole year, which was fun. I’m much better at writing Rust now, but I enjoyed the year and cadence less overall.
So for me, I’ll probably try to complete the Rust track and double down on what I’ve been doing in '24. I’m not sure how we turn that into a challenge, but that’s maybe ok. TBH I’m not sure that Exercism needs yearly themes on top of its existing functionality, especially if they don’t add a ton.
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I get most of my endorphins out of mentoring. There’s maintenance that needs to be done but I’m really strapped for time these days. I do appreciate the badges but they’re not what I pursue. Mind you, it’d be nice to finish some/all of the language tracks I’ve started (and the one’s I’m supposed to be developing).
Like @xavdid I warmed more to 12in23 than 48in24.
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I also enjoy learning new stuffs, and the 2023 format was great for me since i have a whole month to dive into a language.
I also wish there are more related/ escalation exercises that are steps to go toward a full project later on, something that could be used for the bootcamp as well.
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I enjoy learning new languages and adding exercises to those languages.
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A year is pretty long so I was thinking we could split it up with phases. I was thinking three four-month phases.
For the first and last phase, the student gets a modal to select a track they want to focus on for the duration of that phase. Then, they can get badges for their progress on that track.
For the middle phase, we do monthly features on a particular track tag, offering badges for progress on the tracks with that tag. That exposes the students to other tracks they may not have considered for the final phase. However, they can reselect the first phase if they want.
There would be a badge per track selected for P1 and P3 so doing two different tracks for those phases would net you two badges. Completing at least one of the P2 featured months gets you a badge for that phase as well.
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I like the encouragement to dive deeply into languages.
Can you elaborate on phase 2? I’m not sure what you’re suggesting.
2023 was my year of exploring many languages (#42in23 plus another dozen where I completed <5 exercises), and now I’m pretty much done with language-hopping. It sounds like I’m not unique in this.
I want to deepen my knowledge of a smaller number of languages (up to 12), and create/extend the learning syllabuses.
(I also want to be healthy, and unfortunately I’ve not managed that over the past several weeks. If anyone wonders why the Julia syllabus seems to have stalled, it’s because my brain has stalled. I hope to be back in action soon.)
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It’d be a mini 12in23 with themes but not featured languages since videos take a lot of effort to prep. A student picks a language from a set of languages for each month and does X exercises.
Although we could just show all the currently available tracks and the student choose freely regardless of theme. It shouldn’t be the P1 language though since the idea is to try at least one another language during this period.
What about if we made it more about a year-long personal challenge?
Keeping up with featured exercises/languages is a lot of work, and without me being able to bribe Erik with a salary to do manage that, I think it’ll be implausible for me to do reliably. So I’d like something that doesn’t need ongoing work.
Instead we could make it more around a challenge to solving 125 (different) practice exercises through the year. That averages one exercise per three day. We have a page with all practice exercises on Exercism, and you have to solve it in a language you’ve not solved it in before. We can show a progress tracker against that ratio, etc. And you get badges for 25/50/75/100 and then 125. Doing 25 is easy for anyone. Doing 125 is hard as there are some hard exercises.
This gives contributors motivation to add some nice new exercises to problem-specs, means people can choose whether to go deep (do them all in one language) or broad (mix it up).
If people want to crowd-source some suggested (interesting/challenging/etc) languages per exercise, I’d be happy to do that too. But I’d want us to generate a complete set (for all exercises) before adding that to the website, And I’d would want to make that a requirement of adding a new exercise to PS too. (it’s probably not THAT much work if lots of people chip in, but it’s not something I have any space for atm). Especially since we already have some from previous years.
This is also something I could do in an hour or two, which is about the total time I could commit to this atm!
Thoughts?
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I don’t know if it is everyone’s tea, but “solve the x exercise in y languages” might be an interesting thing for people to explore.
I tried leap in different languages and that was an educational comparison for me.
Personally, I really like this sort of flexibility.
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Also instead of video, have you thought about just doing a one off info graphic contains key elements for the whole year event?
It would probably save a lot of time, easier to share and consume.
I hope I am not too late to this discussion. I have made a reasonable attempt at 12in23 and 48in24, and I am certainly looking forward to another challenge next year. Huge thanks to all those who made it possible.
12in23 motivated me to look at many more languages than I would normally consider and gave a huge boost to my involvement with Exercism. I failed to finish because my work year end is too busy, but I would love to have another go.
One suggestion would be to run 12in23 again, maybe with a second set of 5 harder exercises for each month, and maybe with more languages in each month. I don’t think you need to prepare video introductions for every language. Your document links and mentoring is enough. (Do people use the hello world exercise to ask how to get started in a language?)
48in24 was also great, and maintained my enthusiasm to keep solving more exercises in more languages. Again I failed to finish, but I am still happy. I would say that there are too many languages to have a chance for most people to finish, so I decided aim for 80% done in just a few languages.
I would be happy to see 48in24 run again, but with different rewards. Maybe bronze for annual completion in one langauge, silver for completion in three language in one year or completion in five langauge over a lifetime, gold for 5 in one year and 8 all time? I would also like to see some more interesting exercises that go beyond low level string manipulation in lots of languages.
I think I am repeating what others have already said here, but what I would like is a motivation to finish language tracks and/or go very broad (>5 languages for bronze, >11 for silver, >20 for gold) over a set of harder exercises.
Finally I wuld be quite happy if you alternate 12in23 and 48in24 for the forseeable coming years. There is lots of scope in both, especially if all credit must be earned in one year.
Once again. Thanks to everyone making Exercism happen. It is a great resource!
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I think your idea of rewards for 25/…/125 newly solved exercises is great. I want to start today. Does that mean you need to call the challenge 25orMoreIn25? Or 125in25?
Please can you clarify a couple of your comments?
Do you have a link to the page with all the practice exercises? I have found, for example, Solve Beer Song on Exercism. Is that what you mean? Exercism does not work.
What do you mean by a “complete set (for all the exercises)” Do you mean for all the languages? And what do you mean by “PS”. Forgive me if this is common knowledge.
Both questions are hopefully answered by me sharing this link 
problem-specifications/exercises at main · exercism/problem-specifications · GitHub
Happy New Year, everyone!
Did we ever reach agreement-in-principle to go with the @iHiD suggestion, or something similar? I assume it will take a while longer to get it up on the website (given Other Distractions at the moment), but it might be useful to have some idea of what we are aiming towards.
I am a little late to the conversation, but I have an interesting suggestion, nonetheless. It seems to me that the point of playing with many languages is to expose yourself to different ideas and ways of thinking. The most significant of these is of course programming paradigms.
The challenge is as follows:
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Choose 5 programming paradigms, i.e. procedural (C), object-oriented (Java), functional (Haskell), declarative (SQL), stack-based (8th), assembly (MIPS), logical (Prolog), scripting (BASH), multiparadigm (Scala), etc.
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Gather a list of 52 exercises shared across the 5 programming paradigms (the actual languages don’t matter).
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The user solves the exercise in 3 paradigms (Bronze), 4 paradigms (Silver), or 5 paradigms (Gold).
The user can use whatever language they wish for a given paradigm, since the paradigm is just a tag on a language. The user could use Java, Dart, or C# for Object Oriented. They could stick with one for all 52 exercises or use different languages for each. They could do the same with Lisp, Clojure or Haskell for functional programming. Lastly, a language would only count for 1 of the 5 paradigms.
Implementing this (I assume) would be rather straight forward, since the languages are already tagged, and the exercise list is language agnostic. I suppose if it is easier 5 particular languages of different paradigms could be chosen.