Curriculum change: track sequence (round 1) #590
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As part of the ongoing curriculum update, this re-orders the core exercises according to perceived difficulty. Most notably, this moves simple-cipher down -- re-orders the list loosly according to this: hello-world, gigasecond, leap, rna-transcription, bob, pangram, space-age, matrix, linked-list, grade-school, robot-name, pascals-triangle, simple-cipher, wordy, secret-handshake, list-ops Since it's a bit weird to introduce Date thát early, it's placed after leap --- for now. Furthermore this moves all the core exercises to the top and all the side exercises unlocked by these below that, in order. The bonus exercises (always unlocked) are at the bottom.
Prime factors is a mathy exercise and as part of round one, mathy exercises should be demoted to side exercise.
This is an extensive exercise with four parts. Even though it's not a particularly difficult one to understand, it's actually difficult for beginners (< 4) to implement. Making this number higher makes sure it's no longer listed as easy.
This generates the output (as of this commit): Core (matches config.json) of this track: - hello-world (1) - leap (1) - gigasecond (2) - rna-transcription (1) - bob (2) - pangram (2) - space-age (3) - matrix (4) - linked-list (5) - grade-school (6) - robot-name (6) - pascals-triangle (5) - simple-cipher (6) - wordy (7) - secret-handshake (6) - list-ops (8) core ---- ├─ hello-world │ ├─ two-fer (1) │ ├─ leap │ ├─ reverse-string (2) │ ├─ triangle (3) │ ├─ collatz-conjecture (3) │ ├─ gigasecond │ ├─ clock (5) │ ├─ meetup (7) │ ├─ rna-transcription │ ├─ hamming (2) │ ├─ etl (2) │ ├─ scrabble-score (5) │ ├─ raindrops (2) │ ├─ allergies (6) │ ├─ nucleotide-count (4) │ ├─ bob │ ├─ beer-song (5) │ ├─ food-chain (4) │ ├─ pig-latin (4) │ ├─ proverb (4) │ ├─ house (4) │ ├─ twelve-days (4) │ ├─ say (6) │ ├─ isbn-verifier (4) │ ├─ pangram │ ├─ isogram (2) │ ├─ phone-number (3) │ ├─ anagram (1) │ ├─ word-count (1) │ ├─ acronym (2) │ ├─ series (3) │ ├─ largest-series-product (7) │ ├─ bracket-push (3) │ ├─ high-scores (2) │ ├─ space-age │ ├─ grains (5) │ ├─ perfect-numbers (3) │ ├─ luhn (4) │ ├─ pythagorean-triplet (5) │ ├─ difference-of-squares (3) │ ├─ complex-numbers (4) │ ├─ prime-factors (4) │ ├─ matrix │ ├─ forth (8) │ ├─ saddle-points (6) │ ├─ ocr-numbers (5) │ ├─ transpose (1) │ ├─ spiral-matrix (4) │ ├─ rectangles (4) │ ├─ linked-list │ ├─ sublist (4) │ ├─ word-search (8) │ ├─ circular-buffer (8) │ ├─ binary-search (7) │ ├─ binary-search-tree (6) │ ├─ custom-set (6) │ ├─ simple-linked-list (8) │ ├─ grade-school │ ├─ two-bucket (6) │ ├─ bowling (8) │ ├─ alphametics (7) │ ├─ connect (7) │ ├─ variable-length-quantity (5) │ ├─ pascals-triangle │ ├─ diamond (5) │ ├─ rational-numbers (5) │ ├─ simple-cipher │ ├─ atbash-cipher (7) │ ├─ crypto-square (9) │ ├─ diffie-hellman (3) │ ├─ rotational-cipher (2) │ ├─ wordy │ ├─ kindergarten-garden (7) │ ├─ robot-simulator (5) │ ├─ list-ops │ ├─ strain (4) │ ├─ accumulate (5) │ ├─ flatten-array (5) │ ├─ prime-factors │ ├─ sieve (5) │ ├─ nth-prime (5) │ ├─ palindrome-products (7) │ ├─ sum-of-multiples (5) │ ├─ change (8) │ bonus ---- - zipper (8) - point-mutations (0) - darts (3) - binary (4) - run-length-encoding (2) - roman-numerals (3) - react (8) - trinary (4) - octal (4) - hexadecimal (4) - queen-attack (8) - all-your-base (5) - minesweeper (7) - protein-translation (1) - armstrong-numbers (2)
SleeplessByte
added
the
enhancement 🦄
Assigning them one up, and give two exercises to "secret-handshake" which had none: Core (matches config.json) of this track: - hello-world (1) - leap (1) - gigasecond (2) - rna-transcription (1) - bob (2) - pangram (2) - space-age (3) - matrix (4) - linked-list (5) - grade-school (6) - robot-name (6) - pascals-triangle (5) - simple-cipher (6) - wordy (7) - secret-handshake (6) - list-ops (8) core ---- ├─ hello-world │ └─ two-fer (1) │ ├─ leap │ ├─ reverse-string (2) │ ├─ triangle (3) │ └─ collatz-conjecture (3) │ ├─ gigasecond │ ├─ clock (5) │ └─ meetup (7) │ ├─ rna-transcription │ ├─ hamming (2) │ ├─ etl (2) │ ├─ scrabble-score (5) │ ├─ raindrops (2) │ ├─ allergies (6) │ └─ nucleotide-count (4) │ ├─ bob │ ├─ beer-song (5) │ ├─ food-chain (4) │ ├─ pig-latin (4) │ ├─ proverb (4) │ ├─ house (4) │ ├─ twelve-days (4) │ ├─ say (6) │ └─ isbn-verifier (4) │ ├─ pangram │ ├─ isogram (2) │ ├─ phone-number (3) │ ├─ anagram (1) │ ├─ word-count (1) │ ├─ acronym (2) │ ├─ series (3) │ ├─ largest-series-product (7) │ ├─ bracket-push (3) │ └─ high-scores (2) │ ├─ space-age │ ├─ grains (5) │ ├─ perfect-numbers (3) │ ├─ luhn (4) │ ├─ pythagorean-triplet (5) │ ├─ difference-of-squares (3) │ ├─ complex-numbers (4) │ ├─ prime-factors (4) │ ├─ sieve (5) │ ├─ nth-prime (5) │ └─ palindrome-products (7) │ ├─ matrix │ ├─ forth (8) │ ├─ saddle-points (6) │ ├─ ocr-numbers (5) │ ├─ transpose (1) │ ├─ spiral-matrix (4) │ └─ rectangles (4) │ ├─ linked-list │ ├─ sublist (4) │ ├─ word-search (8) │ ├─ circular-buffer (8) │ ├─ binary-search (7) │ ├─ binary-search-tree (6) │ ├─ custom-set (6) │ └─ simple-linked-list (8) │ ├─ grade-school │ ├─ two-bucket (6) │ ├─ bowling (8) │ ├─ alphametics (7) │ ├─ connect (7) │ └─ variable-length-quantity (5) │ ├─ robot-name │ ├─ pascals-triangle │ ├─ diamond (5) │ └─ rational-numbers (5) │ ├─ simple-cipher │ ├─ atbash-cipher (7) │ ├─ crypto-square (9) │ ├─ diffie-hellman (3) │ └─ rotational-cipher (2) │ ├─ wordy │ ├─ kindergarten-garden (7) │ └─ robot-simulator (5) │ ├─ secret-handshake │ ├─ sum-of-multiples (5) │ └─ change (8) │ ├─ list-ops │ ├─ strain (4) │ ├─ accumulate (5) │ └─ flatten-array (5) │ bonus ---- - zipper (8) - point-mutations (0) - darts (3) - binary (4) - run-length-encoding (2) - roman-numerals (3) - react (8) - trinary (4) - octal (4) - hexadecimal (4) - queen-attack (8) - all-your-base (5) - minesweeper (7) - protein-translation (1) - armstrong-numbers (2)
| printLn(`│ ├─ ${side.slug} (${side.difficulty})`) | ||
| track[slug].forEach((side, index, self) => { | ||
| junction = index === self.length - 1 ? '└─' : '├─' | ||
| printLn(`│ ${junction} ${side.slug} (${side.difficulty})`) | ||
| }) |
config.json
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| @@ -95,19 +52,18 @@ | |||
| ] | |||
| }, | |||
| { | |||
| "slug": "simple-cipher", | |||
| "uuid": "62d60b42-93bc-4de9-90d1-1ca18a847812", | |||
| "slug": "bob", | |||
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I'm wondering if bob is actually a difficulty 2 exercise. I've seen so many people struggle with it in other tracks, that I'm now moving it farther to the end of the track. But maybe it is differently in JavaScript.
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It's not. Regex is medium. We probably want more exercises in-between
config.json
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| "control_flow_conditionals", | ||
| "control_flow_loops", | ||
| "randomness", | ||
| "pattern_recognition", |
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We don't have a specific set of guidelines, but those are an awful lot of topics :) I would suggest perhaps only listing the "core" ones. For example, it now lists "regular_expressions" as a topic, but is that something a student necessarily has to use when doing the exercise? If not, it might be useful to drop it (the C# track is not a great example by the way, as the topics there should be cleaned-up for the exact same reason).
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Yeh I want to retag them anyway because they are also wrong sometimes!
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Brilliant @SleeplessByte I will have a look at this tonight. |
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I knoooooow how tempting it is to improve All The Things. 💙 |
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@F3PiX is right of course: please focus on the re-ordering and take my comments for what they are: just hints for a future improvement :) |
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@ErikSchierboom and @F3PiX haha don't worry. This is why I didn't include #591 with this as I know it's part of the next rounds! I want to spend some time with @tejasbubane too to make sure we both agree on the tags etc and that won't be part of this PR. Speaking of him, @tejasbubane how do you feel about Moving it further down will probably solve that partially. EDIT: perhaps |
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@tejasbubane Did you have a chance to look at this yesterday? I'd like to get this merged tomorrow if possible so that we can move on to the next step. (As always, we can change things further later as new information surfaces!) |
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@SleeplessByte @kytrinyx Sorry I missed out on it yesterday. I just had a look at this - a few comments:
I am not aware of the further rounds you have in mind. These are just the points that I can think of looking at the list. We can choose to discuss/implement these in later steps. |
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We both agree on moving it down so I'll make that change.
Yes we will look at list ops and linked list's removal later, as this is
not part of round one :). I'll check list ops implementation again today
and see if there is a better position.
…On Thu, 24 Jan 2019, 09:28 Tejas Bubane, ***@***.***> wrote:
@SleeplessByte <https://github.com/SleeplessByte> @kytrinyx
<https://github.com/kytrinyx> Sorry I missed out on it yesterday. I just
had a look at this - a few comments:
-
I don't think list-ops has a difficulty of 8. There are quite a few
operations to be implemented, but still 8 is pretty high.
-
Do we need to keep both list-ops and linked-list in core? I know both
are different (linked-list is doubly-linked list), but still they are
related, so maybe linked-list unlocks list-ops?
-
bob is slightly complex with the nested conditionals and regex
(although regex is not strictly required but lot of students go that way).
Maybe move it down a bit or remove it from core and replace with one from
the list it unlocks (beer-song maybe?)
I am not aware of the further process you have in mind. These are just the
points that I can think of looking at the list. We can choose to
discuss/implement these in later steps.
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- Moving bob down - Moving list-ops up - Moving space-age up (because of new exercise implementation)
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I've made some additional changes to reflect everyone's commentary here (cc @tejasbubane). I don't think the side unlocks are great right now, but I think that's part of a future round. This should do for now! Thanks everyone :) |
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@tejasbubane if you can give a final LGTM (new ordering), I'm happy to finish round 1 according to Coda :) |
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This is the current core order: Looks good to me 👍 |
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Can we merge this? |
As part of [The Track Anatomy Project][1], the Haskell core track is restructured in #798 using @F3PiX'es multi-stage framework referred to as "The Track Tool". Since The Track Tool is still under development, it isn't documented yet. But the execution of the first step can be viewed for other languages, e.g. exercism/javascript#590. --- Proposal: - Switch "Bob" and "Pangram". They're both about handling textual data. Pangram has fewer gotchas, is quicker done, has more variations among its alternative solutions, and doesn't lend itself as well to `Data.Text`. (See #795.) Bob often involves more refactoring, has more learning objectives and has the extra "You could do it with Data.Text, too!" part. This way people don't try to solve Pangram with Data.Text which is possible but not ideal without mono-traversable, and they get an exercise more under their belt before being thrown into a lot of refactoring. - Switch "Nucleotide Count" and "Sum of Multiples". Eventually I think we should delete "Sum of Multiples" and "Grains" (see #761). But since The Track Tool does not address removal yet, I want to make "Nucleotide Count" come immediately after "RNA Transcription", since they're both thematically related and Nucleotide Count uses Either while RNA Transcription uses Maybe for monadic error handling, so they practice the same thing in progressive difficulty. The proposed track reordering looks like: 1. hello-world 2. leap 3. space-age 4. **pangram** 5. **bob** 6. collatz-conjecture 7. rna-transcription 8. **nucleotide-count** 9. sum-of-multiples 10. grains [1]: https://exercism.io/blog/track-anatomy-project
This PR is the result of work being done to structure the exercises in a track according to a predefined methodology (this work is not finished). This first step (of many rounds) attempts to remove Math and DIY exercises from the core track, and fix obvious problems with the sequence of the existing core exercises. The result is as follows:
(Taken the format from exercism/csharp#740, thanks @ErikSchierboom!)
You can generate this output running
bin/print-config-tree(and make your own changes to config.json to see the effect).The most notable changes are:
space-age: moved up to 5th place. The new tests / implementation requirements make it far simpler to work out.gigasecond: has move up from the 7th place to the 3rd place. It's quite simple to understand and implement and as its goal is to introduce the Date type early on as a very important core data type in javascript, it makes sense to move it up.list-ops: moved up from last to 12th place.bob: moved down to 8th place.simple-cipher: has moved down considerably from 4th to13th14th place. This is a change inspired by JavaScript and TypeScript track issues exercism#4577, mentoring and Non linear learning curve #564. It's a great exercise, but not this early on in the track. The implementation differences and lack of knowledge of the standard library also makes it so that mentors don't like mentoring this. Both in JS and TS, the time to wait is between 1 week and 2 months (!). Moving this down should resolve this!prime-factors: no longer a core exercise. This is due to a recently added policy to exclude "mathy" exercises as core exercise.My notes on the current core exercises are as follows and as you might be able to tell is that I'm trying to introduce a minimum number of subjects with each exercise. Bad or meh here refers to the test suite, the implementation or the exercise as a whole (in terms of teaching fluency of the language).
Not all of these have mentoring notes -- that will be next up.
The current ordering is still not perfect and there is still lots to improve, but I feel it is definitely an improvement over the current situation. I'm interested in hearing your thoughts!