From: surrender_it@... (gabriele renzi @ google)
Date: 2004-09-17T18:59:47+09:00
Subject: Re: Want a regular Ruby Quiz? (long)

James Edward Gray II <james@grayproductions.net> wrote in message news:<1D0C97E9-081C-11D9-B4D9-000A95BA45F8@grayproductions.net>...
> I'm a fan of short, but regular programming "challenges" or "quizzes".  
> I've seen a couple of others express the same sentiment here and even 
> on the new Ruby Forum.  Given that, I thought I would seriously gage 
> interest.
> Main Question:  I can spare the time to organize and run a Ruby Quiz.  
> Would you, the Ruby community, like to have that?

sure, it would be cool :)
Actually the Italian Ruby User Group use to have a rubyquiz of the
month, but we're, well, quite not regular, nearly 5 quiz in two years
;)

<snip>
> I see little value in the Perl Quiz's Regular/Expert distinction 
> though, so I would drop that.  When we thought up a tougher problem, 
> our quiz would be tougher and when we didn't it would be easy.  
> Different problems are different difficultly to different coders 
> anyway.  If one question doesn't appeal to you...  Well, enjoy the week 
> off.

I strongly diagree with this (but this is just an opinion, anyway). 

Suppose you have a standard quiz. You may find interesting how to
build a memoize() method or Memoized class, but nubys will get really
little out of it. At the same time, if you have too simple tests,
gurus won't have fun with them.
So I really think you should have a nubyquiz wich is *really* easy,
stuff like 'write a simple function that prints "I want a cookie!'
till you enter the world cookie.' It may seem dumb, but is anyway a
great tool to show many different approaches and to teach basic
things. Nubys want stuff like that. They want simple problems to solve
that they can understand.
At least I wanted :)


> I'm thinking we would keep the quiz on this list.  I would prepend a 
> [QUIZ] to the front of question and summary subjects, for clarity.  I 
> could place a reminder in the quiz questions for people posting 
> solutions and discussion to do the same.

agreed
 
> I'm offering myself as the fallback source of questions.  I would add a 
> footer to the quiz messages, inviting people to submit questions 
> directly to me.  When quiz time rolls around, I would choose a 
> submission or provide one of my own.  The community would be strongly 
> encouraged to submit questions as I'm not a Ruby expert.  I imagine I 
> would stumble across an interesting topic from time to time, and a dull 
> one at least as often.  Be warned.

that is one of the reason our quiz is so irregular ;)
 
<snip>
> A final issue I'm undecided on:  Perl's Quiz has a "grace period" (60 
> hours) before solutions SHOULD be posted, to allow people time to think 
> the problem through on their own before they examine the solutions of 
> others.  Rot13 encrypting solutions would probably have about the same 
> level of security, just to throw out a Usenet-like alternative.  It's 
> strictly custom and not enforced, but it works more often than not.  
> I'm interested in hearing what others think about this.

the usual approach that is followed on the aenigmistic newsgroups I
follow is just a simple thing like:

----
s
p
o
i
l
e
r
<solution>
---

or 
----
..
..
..
..
..
..
spoiler
..
..
..
..
<solution>
----

but imo timing is the key ;) 


thank you.