Programming Praxis

The exercise that will be published on Tuesday will be the fiftieth exercise published at Programming Praxis, marking our Golden Anniversary. My thanks to all you readers, and especially those who contributed code and other comments, for making this blog special. I am always delighted to hear from my readers, especially if they are contributing an idea for an exercise (hint, hint). It’s a lot of fun writing these exercises, but also a lot of work, and your contributions make it worthwhile. <grin>I can tell that the blog is starting to be successful because spam comments, which I must delete manually, now exceed ham comments.</grin>

Tuesday’s exercise will also introduce a change in the structure of the exercises. The suggested solution will be on a separate page published forty-eight hours after the exercise. That gives regular readers a chance to work on their own solutions without being influenced by the suggested solution. Comments will be attached to the exercise, not the solution.

Our first fifty exercises have developed several themes: related sequences of exercises involving prime numbers and cryptography, exercises in data structures like ternary search tries and exercises in algorithms like modular arithmetic, some exercises simple and others not-quite-so simple, and puzzles like sudoku and Feynman. The next fifty exercises will be more of the same, featuring some new sequences of related exercises, some old friends, and the odd puzzle or two. And I am always open to suggestions!

To celebrate our Golden Anniversary, Tuesday’s exercise will be somewhat more ambitious than normal, so get those compilers revving. Happy coding! And please enjoy a piece of virtual anniversary cake!

And now, may I ask for your help. I would like to move the site from wordpress.com to its own host, still running WordPress software, so that I can finally fix the theme and, more importantly, automate some processes that I am currently doing by hand (and some others I am not doing at all). But I have never blogged before, and have no experience with hosting, or migrating a domain registration, or maintaining a WordPress installation. If some reader would like to offer advice, please contact me at programmingpraxis@gmail.com.