I want to propose a programming challenge. This could be fun for beginners and experienced programmers as well. It is language agnostic. It might even be more about community than the programming part itself. The challenge itself should not take more than an hour. But it shouldn't be so simple that you don't have to put in a little effort. I will propose the first one, and those who participate are welcome to propose the next and as we can agree on it we can go off and knock it out.

Once you see other people's results you can modify your own, or even propose something to make someone else's better or faster or fix a bug that you find.

These can become toy programs for you to have around for testing concepts, and helping to try out other languages.

If you are interested or know someone else who might want to play too share this with them.

I guess we can use this thread to get started, and I guess i am supposed to use a hashtag for something like this so how about

I will try to work in Python at least in the beginning but you are welcome to work in whatever you are comfortable with.


First challenge:

"Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall"

Generate the whole song from "Ninety-nine" to "No". The output should look like :

Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall.
Ninety-nine bottles of beer. Take one down,
pass it around... Ninety-eight bottles of beer.

(You know what the middle looks like)

Two bottles of beer on the wall.
Two bottles of beer. Take one down,
pass it around... one bottle of beer.

One bottle of beer on the wall.
One bottle of beer. Take one down,
pass it around... No bottles of beer.

I won't put too many specifics on how you get there, but the output should be words, not numerals :) Try to write clean, maintainable and visually understandable code.

Let see if I am alone or anyone wants to play along. :)

Here is my first attempt total time 48 minutes.

git.qoto.org/Absinthe/ninety_n

@Absinthe

Here's mine. I ended up adapting your solution for converting numbers to words, because it's more lightweight than the known solutions in my language of choice. Cheers.

github.com/patchcali/toy-progr

#toyprogrammingchallenge

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@bii Wonderful! Visual fox pro? I haven't seen that in a while. Glad I could contribute .. :) Unfortunately there is absolutely no way I could run that here :)

@Absinthe

Haha, yeah, yeah :)

Heck, with support for Windows 7 and 8 ending soon, there'll soon enough come a time when *I* won't be able to run it either. [stage whisper] "that's why I'm learning python..."

But VFP served my career well for twenty-some years, and it does still run on a lot of machines.

It's the language & dev environment I'm still most familiar with, though I hadn't touched it in a while, so I saw this as an opportunity to fire up the ol' IDE again.

@bii In that case I would challenge you to try it in python, or at least the next challenge should be python. :)

@Absinthe Hang on a moment while I rummage around in my meme archive for that "Why not both?" gif ;) But, yeah!

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