I’m not super happy with the change so far. The site has a lot more going on. It’s very visually busy. I used to love how simple the site was. I’ll probably be less overwhelmed as I use it more, but it’s difficult to parse right now.
Another annoyance is that you can’t look at top rated community solutions right now (as best as I can tell). Instead you can search by user or see the most recent solutions. Seeing the highest rated solutions was often enlightening. It would often teach me about different corners of a language.
Hopefully I’ll adjust and features that I used will be added back. It’s a pretty nice site though.
Oh, interesting! I didn’t realize it was open source. I’ll take a look at that. I don’t think they would want to go back to a more stripped down work, but they would probably appreciate help with adding features back.
Looks fantastic. I love the addition of a real learning path and syllabus. The online code editor and tester also works great. I’ve been doing Elixir exercises and it is just so nice to do it all in a browser without needing any local setup. The code editor could be better / smarter but maybe that is for a next iteration.
I only used it briefly to learn, but I’ve been mentoring the Elm track for about a year now. It’s been really great seeing people go through the track and also in other parts of the Elm community. I also frequently see people coming over from Haskell, Python, and lots of other languages.
I did the Elixir path at the beginning of the pandemic last year. It was fun and the mentors were responsive. I would recommend it!
This year I’ve been doing the Haskell path and the mentors are insightful, but very slow to get through the backlog. It would be weeks between reviews. As a result, I haven’t made a ton of progress on the main track. (You can do unguided exercises as well, but there are a fixed number at each level.)
The difference here might be that Elixir advertises exercism on their website, but Haskell does not. In both cases I think its worthwhile and I really enjoy the site. Just be aware that it’s going to be dependent on some combination of the language community, the mentors and the number of people who want to learn the language.
Do you have any languages that you are interested in?
The changes in v3 (requesting mentoring is opt-in rather than opt-out and there are learning exercises) will hopefully mean that students who want mentoring get it quicker.
I don’t see anything about improvements to the client… which seems like a missed opportunity in a big version bump.
Limitations/bugs/bad design decisions in it were a turn off for me when I tried out their platform. I could have worked around them if I really needed to, but it wasn’t clear the benefit was worth it, so I just moved on.
My issues largely stemmed from their opinionated way of wanting to force everything into a specific directory hierarchy that the tool managed, which didn’t really mesh with how I had things organized and tools setup to manage. Then any attempts to work around that quickly devolved into chasing weird bugs where the tool didn’t properly handle (and frequently just blew up when encountering) symlinks, spanning filesystems, extra filesystem attributes, filename case (in)sensitivity where it didn’t expect it, and pretty much anything slightly out of the “norm” of a plain folder at the top level of your home directory.
Given that it’s little more than a tool to zip & upload a pile of files, it really had no business forcing its own directory management on top of things and the hassle of trying to work around that, and the bugginess doing so exposed, just made me give up.
The tool is opinionated about filesystem hierarchy because that makes things simpler for users, especially novices.
I’m sorry you had difficulties, but if you really want to use a different filesystem layout you could hack around it fairly easily or just adapt or write a new client: the client is open source and the API fairly simple.
The tool is opinionated about filesystem hierarchy because that makes things simpler for users, especially novices.
It’s not clear at all to me that the platform is targeted to (nor a great fit for) someone with so little computer experience that they can’t manage filesystem directories without handholding. Also the “simpler” case only applies if it works correctly all the time – if it introduces its own bugs in trying to do so, now the user is left dealing with those instead.
I’m sure I could have come up with a workaround, but the obvious options I attempted ran up against the stream of long unaddressed problems I found trying and reading through the issue tracker – which made me not really want to invest any more time. It’s not like there is a lack of options out there for learning materials, and when the introduction to a platform is having to rewrite their tools, I tend to just move on.
I’m not super happy with the change so far. The site has a lot more going on. It’s very visually busy. I used to love how simple the site was. I’ll probably be less overwhelmed as I use it more, but it’s difficult to parse right now.
Another annoyance is that you can’t look at top rated community solutions right now (as best as I can tell). Instead you can search by user or see the most recent solutions. Seeing the highest rated solutions was often enlightening. It would often teach me about different corners of a language.
Hopefully I’ll adjust and features that I used will be added back. It’s a pretty nice site though.
It’s an open source project - maybe commit some improvements?
Oh, interesting! I didn’t realize it was open source. I’ll take a look at that. I don’t think they would want to go back to a more stripped down work, but they would probably appreciate help with adding features back.
I’m happy for their v3 launch but like you, I noticed the deterioration of front-end. I think its a SPA now? (And a pretty sluggish one)
Looks fantastic. I love the addition of a real learning path and syllabus. The online code editor and tester also works great. I’ve been doing Elixir exercises and it is just so nice to do it all in a browser without needing any local setup. The code editor could be better / smarter but maybe that is for a next iteration.
Did anyone here use Exercism to learn a new language? Learned about it today and would be interested to read some journeys.
I used it to learn Legacy JavaScript and Ruby. I have used it to practice Rust and Clojure after learning the basic syntax through other information.
I’ve more gotten the hang of TDD though it. Red, green, refactor.
https://exercism.org/profiles/ClashTheBunny
I only used it briefly to learn, but I’ve been mentoring the Elm track for about a year now. It’s been really great seeing people go through the track and also in other parts of the Elm community. I also frequently see people coming over from Haskell, Python, and lots of other languages.
I did the Elixir path at the beginning of the pandemic last year. It was fun and the mentors were responsive. I would recommend it!
This year I’ve been doing the Haskell path and the mentors are insightful, but very slow to get through the backlog. It would be weeks between reviews. As a result, I haven’t made a ton of progress on the main track. (You can do unguided exercises as well, but there are a fixed number at each level.)
The difference here might be that Elixir advertises exercism on their website, but Haskell does not. In both cases I think its worthwhile and I really enjoy the site. Just be aware that it’s going to be dependent on some combination of the language community, the mentors and the number of people who want to learn the language.
Do you have any languages that you are interested in?
The changes in v3 (requesting mentoring is opt-in rather than opt-out and there are learning exercises) will hopefully mean that students who want mentoring get it quicker.
I don’t see anything about improvements to the client… which seems like a missed opportunity in a big version bump.
Limitations/bugs/bad design decisions in it were a turn off for me when I tried out their platform. I could have worked around them if I really needed to, but it wasn’t clear the benefit was worth it, so I just moved on.
What limitations/bugs/bad design do you recall?
The command line client has always been fine for me…
My issues largely stemmed from their opinionated way of wanting to force everything into a specific directory hierarchy that the tool managed, which didn’t really mesh with how I had things organized and tools setup to manage. Then any attempts to work around that quickly devolved into chasing weird bugs where the tool didn’t properly handle (and frequently just blew up when encountering) symlinks, spanning filesystems, extra filesystem attributes, filename case (in)sensitivity where it didn’t expect it, and pretty much anything slightly out of the “norm” of a plain folder at the top level of your home directory.
Given that it’s little more than a tool to zip & upload a pile of files, it really had no business forcing its own directory management on top of things and the hassle of trying to work around that, and the bugginess doing so exposed, just made me give up.
The tool is opinionated about filesystem hierarchy because that makes things simpler for users, especially novices.
I’m sorry you had difficulties, but if you really want to use a different filesystem layout you could hack around it fairly easily or just adapt or write a new client: the client is open source and the API fairly simple.
It’s not clear at all to me that the platform is targeted to (nor a great fit for) someone with so little computer experience that they can’t manage filesystem directories without handholding. Also the “simpler” case only applies if it works correctly all the time – if it introduces its own bugs in trying to do so, now the user is left dealing with those instead.
I’m sure I could have come up with a workaround, but the obvious options I attempted ran up against the stream of long unaddressed problems I found trying and reading through the issue tracker – which made me not really want to invest any more time. It’s not like there is a lack of options out there for learning materials, and when the introduction to a platform is having to rewrite their tools, I tend to just move on.