Does anyone here use Exercism? I’ve started using it to learn Elixir, and it seems to be good. I’m thinking about having my kids use it as well for Python and JS/TS.

I’d be interested to hear if anyone’s used it for a long time, and if there’s any advantages or disadvantages to it. Or if there are other, better code exercise sites I should check out.

  •  kittenroar   ( @kittenroar@beehaw.org ) 
    link
    fedilink
    English
    3
    edit-2
    8 months ago

    It’s pretty great - it has nice tooling and well structured problems to sharpen your programming skill on. One issue I discovered is, if you are studying a less popular language, the difficulty ratings tend to be inaccurate - things that are labeled medium might be super easy, while things labeled easy might be super difficult.

    Also, just because something passes in your local doesn’t mean it will pass on exercism - the resources allocated to their cloud servers are skinnier than what you are likely running. This is part of what pushes problems another level up in difficulty.

    • Good to know! I’ve been using local testing and fortunately haven’t run into a case where the tests pass local and fail on their servers. Yet.

      My most intense solution so far had been a very multi-core Knapsack solution. The tests they provided are pretty minuscule, which probably helped.