adventofcode.com posted coding problems like an advents calendar in December 2015. As I was travelling in Asia during that time, something limited like that was a good way to keep my coding skill fresh without having to spend too much time.
To make the whole thing a bit more challenging, I try to use as many programming languages as I can, possibly a different one for each day.
My Pyhton skills are pretty basic. So far I have only used for scripting small things, and always learning only what I needed for the small problems I had to solve.
Seems like a good match for adventofcode as well ;)
End of January 2016 I stayed on the Philippines. Their currency is the Philippine Peso, a heritage from the times when they were a spanish colony. The shortcode for it is PHP.
I learned PHP back in 1999, when it was still sometimes referred to as Personal Home Page. Already back then, it was the easiest way to get server side code running on a webserver. Much of my early career as a software developer was about writing a lot of PHP code. I'm not doing that much anymore, but then Spain doesn't have the Peso anymore as well.
I wrote my first JavaScripts in 1996, targeting Netscape Navigator 2.0. The language has gone a long way and was deemed to "die soon" several times in those 20 years. However, development never stopped, and first with the rise of AJAX and later going (back) to the server with node.js it proved to be a very valuable tool, besides its shortcomings.
Although I never wrote any complex shell scripts, nor do I write any very often, I still like the brevity of the code, i.e. doing a lot with writing so little. Lacking the practice, I have to learn the syntax all over again every time, but hey. For the simple brute-force attack on the AdventCoins problem it seemed to be the perfect tool.
Back in the days, PERL was THE language of choice for backend web development of so called CGI scripts. I never really got into it, and actually tried to avoid ever since. Still, I guess it has its fair place in the world, and for handling string patter recognition it is a good match.
Pascal was the second programming language I ever learned, afer Basic. I was during my teenage years at school, and besides a short adventure into concurrent pascal during university, I have never used it again since then.
Luckily, there is FreePascal with a decent documentation, and a plugin for IntelliJ, so getting back into it was easy enough to solve the puzzle.