Lately my daily addiction has been Advent of Code. It's a two-part programming challenge posted every day at midnight from Dec 1 to Dec 25. As long as you submit the right answer, you can use any language you like, or pencil and paper for that matter. It's not like some programming-challenge websites where they validate your solution by executing code that you submit.

I've been going back and forth between Swift and Python, both languages I'm new at. It's been a useful learning experience, both at the nitty-gritty level of language details and a more meta level about how I could maybe solve problems better. Sometimes I port my solutions from one language to the other, either to compare how the languages feel, to compare how the code performs, or simply for practice.

Lately I've been strongly preferring Python as my go-to language for these exercises. I have three main reasons.

Reason One: my Python code launches quicker without needing a moment to compile like Swift does, which means I can test and iterate faster, which means more immediate gratification.

Reason Two: simple string manipulation and array slicing are much quicker to code in Python, which means I do less typing and my simple intentions aren't buried in syntax. I wonder how daunting the learning curve seems regarding Swift strings, whether for new programmers or programmers coming to Swift from other languages. I wonder if there are some simplifications I'm missing.

Reason Three: it's trivial in Python to get an MD5 hash, which a few of this year's exercises have been requiring. People have written Swift wrapper code that does MD5 hashes, but every time I start to explore my options I think, "I'd rather work on solving the puzzle I wanted to solve, and I can do that right now in Python." Again, immediate gratification. Also, the Swift wrappers I've seen all require using an Objective-C bridge, which as far as I know requires using an Xcode project, which makes things heavier than I'd like.

One thing I'd like to revisit and get better at is using Swift playgrounds (with a lowercase "p" as in Xcode, not an uppercase "P" as in iPad; it drives me curse-out-loud nuts when I try to Google for the former and only get results for the latter). I tried using playgrounds for the early Advent of Code exercises, but I felt too attached to using breakpoints and lldb, which aren't available in playgrounds. Instead I've been using CodeRunner, which conveniently integrates debuggers for both Swift and Python. It's just right for this kind of lightweight coding and experimenting.

Here's my code. Note that this is not production-quality code. It's often sloppy, it often misses opportunities to solve the problem in a smarter way, it almost always assumes valid input, it's under-commented, and in at least one case it's way over-engineered.