I am beginner who thought before doing the String Methods section of the course “You know what, let’s test my skills”. And boy my skills were tested. After I completed the challenge my jaw dropped, with the solution.
Had/Have this happened to y’all. Where you make something complicated and found out that there was a simple solution?
Solution
My Code
All the time and I’ve been programming professionally for 10+ years.
You’ll always find a better way to do something, however, there’s nothing wrong with what you initially came up with as it’s easy enough to understand because you’ve named your variables well and your logic is easy to follow along with. I would say that is far more important than coming up with technically clever solution that may be harder for someone else to understand!
so technically clever solution < long solution with good variable names?
From a maintainability standpoint, absolutely. Computers have gotten fast enough to let programmers optimize for developer time instead
Oh yeah all the time. Its what taught me to RTFM because in higher languages like JS or Python there typically already is a built-in function to manipulate basic types like arrays and strings, so my goal is usually to exhaust the API reference for a certain object and google around before committing to writing my own for-loop to iterate over an array.
But props on your code! It is very legible which is always the best place to start at before optimizing. Write legible code and when you’re sure there are no more features you need to add then start optimizing.
Problem with RTFM for me is I always forget what I had read the next day, how do you remember what you read?
You have to try and remember the primitive operations available. Say you want to check if any array element matches a predicate. This is a basic operation that’s abstracted for almost every language. If we look for “JS array any”, we’ll get the right function as an MDM result (
some). And this works for almost anything. Just try to describe the operation in simple terms and google - you’ll quickly find the function you need, and after some time it will become easier and easier :)I look up the exact behavior of some basic Kotlin collection lambdas all the time. Does filter return elements with true or false lambda return value? I’ll just Google it instead of relying on my memory.
That’s the neat part, you don’t! Don’t have to remember shit, just look it up again.
a couple notes
- you should declare all variables with
letbefore you assign them, it’s good practice and you can enforce it by enabling strict mode - put;at the beginning of your function (or the entire script). Of course it’s only needed in browsers, strict mode is usually enabled by default in most tools. - try not to execute extra code if you can help it. For example, in this case only the final
reversedWordvalue matters, so you can do it at the end as opposed to on every iteration. Your code right now works in O(N^2) - with every new character in the string its speed decreases exponentially, but it should work in O(N) - a linear time. If you couldn’t createreversedWordat the end, you could still initialize it with an empty string and append some text with+=on every iteration, that still works in O(N) time as you don’t have to recreate the entire string on every iteration.
(For point 1) Got it, from now on variables will be declared with
let. I don’t understand what is;maybe you can explain it.(For point 2) I was testing to see if
reversedWordprinted the desired output in the Console, forgot to remove it after finishing the program. I also don’t understand what ‘O(N^2)’ and ‘O(N)’ is, but+=-ing an empty string is a great idea, why didn’t i think of that.
- you should declare all variables with
