I just completed "Handheld Halting" - Day 8 - Advent of Code 2020 #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/2020/day/8 in #JuliaLang.
Spent way too long on Part 2 thinking there must be an interesting non-bruteforce way to solve it. reddit also seems to be concluding there's no neater way of solving it, just straight up try everything, which is disappointing.
That's one thing I miss in AoC compared to Project Euler and others, there's no "Aha!" moment when solving the challenges, no particular insight gained from thinking about and coming up with the solutions. Seems like I should treat this more like a replacement for a mini-project one might do to learn a language, with straightforward code (which still takes work, just not the focused, creative type of mental work that coding challenges usually require), rather than as tricky puzzles with interesting solutions.