Exercises no longer ask developers to 'write a function' (#2396) #2406
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Signed-off-by: Adam Henley <adamazing@gmail.com>
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…c language) Signed-off-by: Adam Henley <adamazing@gmail.com>
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Thanks for your feedback @IsaacG! I've applied your specific suggestions and made changes based on the feedback about use of the word |
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For what it's worth:
I partly disagree. Rather, 'return' has a function-specific meaning in contexts that include functions. In contexts that do not include functions, such as the programming language tracks that this PR aims to serve, it does not have this specific meaning. Words do not inherently have meanings. Instead, their meanings always depend on context. Case in point: berries. Another example: what was a compiler prior to 1900, what did it mean to the person who coined the term in computer context, and what does it mean to most programmers today (and which word took on the previous meaning)? I do not think it makes sense to navigate around using 'return' when it makes the overall sentence worse. |
| @@ -4,4 +4,4 @@ Count the frequency of letters in texts using parallel computation. | |||
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| Parallelism is about doing things in parallel that can also be done sequentially. | |||
| A common example is counting the frequency of letters. | |||
| Create a function that returns the total frequency of each letter in a list of texts and that employs parallelism. | |||
| Employ parallelism to return the total frequency of each letter in a list of texts. | |||
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| Employ parallelism to return the total frequency of each letter in a list of texts. | |
| Employ parallelism to calculate the total frequency of each letter in a list of texts. |
Not because I dislike 'return', but because I feel 'calculate' fits better.
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There is an ongoing discussion about this exercise and whether solutions must use parallelism vs concurrency vs allowing non interleaved solutions. It might be worth holding off on any changes here for a bit to reduce churn. On the other hand, this said parallelism before and that word isn't changing.
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@IsaacG, I made a call to keep the change with @MatthijsBlom's s/return/calculate/ suggestion since -- as you say -- the word parallelism is there as it was before (and parallel is still in the exercise name/slug 😅) but LMK if you feel strongly that it should be removed from this PR.
My feeling is that this way, the function-specific language issue is resolved, whereas it may be forgotten/overlooked amid the parallelism/concurrency debate?
Thanks for your time and your feedback 🙇
If the goal of this issue/PR is to have the text "work" for all tracks, "return" doesn't work well for tracks like awk or bash that asks you to print a value to STDOUT. awk and bash do have functions but the test runners operate by executing a process and capturing STDOUT. Without getting into semantic definitions, I don't think changing "function" to "return" makes the text apply better. The sqlite tests require writing code that updates a column in a table. "Return" isn't a great word to use there, either. |
…nucleotide-codons description Signed-off-by: Adam Henley <adamazing@gmail.com>
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| # Description | |||
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| Write a function that returns the name of an amino acid a particular codon, possibly using shorthand, encodes for. | |||
| Translate a given codon into the name of the amino acid that it encodes, possibly using shorthand. | |||
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If we're rewording this, the exercise asks you to translate a sequence of codons into a sequence of amino acids. There's no shorthands in any of the tracks that I've seen.
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I think that's explained in the description. DNA has the 4 bases, Adenine, Cytine, Thymine, Guanine. The shorthand it talks about is to do with the fact that multiple codons can map to the same amino acid, e.g. AAA and AAG both map to Lysine. So the shorthand they came up with is AAR (R means A|G). I think the "may use shorthand" language is due to the fact that the input might be "AAA", "AAG", or "AAR" and the expected output would be "Lysine"? But I haven't done the exercise yet.
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Sorry, wrote that from phone while horizontal and in pain 😅. Had a quick chance to search, and -- because the exercise is deprecated? -- I've only found it (locked) on the Rust track. Because of that and the fact that there's no canonical-data.json file I can't confirm my assumption above is correct.
Since the exercise is deprecated, is it worth further effort to refine the text?
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Since the exercise is deprecated, is it worth further effort to refine the text?
Not really
Signed-off-by: Adam Henley <adamazing@gmail.com>
Some proposed wording changes to avoid use of "write a function"/"create a function".
PR for Issue #2396