From: Peter Szinek <peter@...>
Date: 2006-03-30T17:26:24+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Black Belt

Alex Combas wrote:
> The problem with rubyquiz is that there is no continuity, it starts off at
> a very high level, newbies have to search around looking for a simple starting
> exercise, probably picking the wrong one, getting frustrated, giving
> up, and then I look
> for a new exercise to try.. and I get frustrated again ..err.. I mean
> "newbies" get
> frustrated again.. ahem.. anyway..

Well, this post was exactly about my issue in this thread, just Alex 
expressed much more better. I have been describing *exactly* the same 
thing. http://www.pythonchallenge.com/ has the great advantage that it 
goes gradually from 'how much is 2^38' till really advanced issues, and 
to go on you were forced to study the techniques needed in a funny and 
addictive way.

Btw, what would You (the whole list) think about porting 
www.pythonchallenge.com to Ruby? (E.g. we could name it... huh... let me 
think... maybe rubychallenge.com? ;-) By the 'porting' i mean several 
different possible levels:

1) (e.g. one-to-one: this you can do actually as-it-is, up to a certain 
level the stuff is solvable even in Java - however, the difference would 
be that the solutions (there is a wiki for solutions) and the discussion
would be in Ruby rathen than in Python. This is the quickest, but 
definitely not the best solution.

2) Using the same style, create a different site with different riddles;
This would be the ultimate solution, but it takes time of course. Time 
is the only negative factor here, all the other ones are positive ( Ruby 
style, thus geared towards ruby constructs like blocks, metaprogramming 
etc..., much improvements (i have also some ideas ;-) etc). The idea we 
need is:

-) it gets harder gradually, thus you have to learn techniques from n00b 
to pro
-) you have to solve level n to go to n+1
-) some really cool riddles
-) good solutions, discussions etc.
-) +improvements - we could introduce even more goodies!

There are some possible levels of porting inbetween 1) and 2). Of course 
the best would be the everything-from-scratch extreme if somebody would 
have time for this (e.g. i would be happy to participate myself, but to 
do this alone would be too time consuming for me due to other tasks. So 
if somebody would like to start with this, LMK). python challange also 
started of much mire simpler, just a few riddles, then they were added 
gradually as people were flooding the authors with 'give me more' ;-)

BTW. pythonchallallange.com was also inspired by notpron 
(www.deathball.net/notpron - titled ' - The Hardest Riddle Available on 
the Internet') so actually it would not be a 'franchise steal'.

If somebody is sceptic about this kind of stuff, he has to try 
pythonchallange to see how addictive it is - it really stirred up the 
python list, everybody was looking for answers in different techniques 
(wrt the task he solved ATM), i remember myself to even neglecting 
normal work to swish through XML-RPC, HTTP and cookies related python 
stuff just to get past a certain level ;-)

What do you think?

peter