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squeaky-clean: change tasks to not include unicode handling #2049
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When reading the instructions it states:
This tells me that it is comprised of zero or more letters and underscores. This tells me that it does not contain anything other than letters and underscores. |
@kotp — I agree with your point and ultimately the test suite defines the specs. But the intent of the exercise is to teach someone new to Java, and possibly new to programming, about string manipulation, and the details of Unicode distract from that instruction. For example, grokking |
I am not the final say, and I think the test makes sense. But not positive about a change for the written specification, the description. The concept taught is I also would say grokking |
This undocumented test is part of a larger issue: the stated goal, written tasks, hints, and tests all seem to disagree on what we're trying to accomplish. If the purpose of Moreover, is it really a good idea to introduce Unicode support alongside My apologies if this is outside the scope of the original issue. |
If the exercise is to remain in its current state, an additional instruction needs to be added to the |
Just an FYI: teaching "new programmers" is not really a goal. We are not trying to teach people new to programming at exercism. There is (effectively) an expectation that you already understand at least one programming language. Exercism is about teaching fluency - generally so that a programmer in language X can learn language Y and get fluent quickly. All that being said, the rest of this discussion seems to be somewhat relevant: we appear to be teaching too much at once in this exercise. We probably need to create a separate concept for instruction about things like unicode. The concept exercises are meant to be trivial for someone that is fluent in the language to create the expected solution (ie. the exemplar). |
OK, proposal:
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Changes to this exercise will be greatly appreciated. This is coming from someone trying to use Exercism to further their knowledge of Java. Upon encountering the squeaky-clean exercise, I almost gave up on using Exercism completely. |
Thanks for the additional insight. Now we just need someone to contribute such a change. Adding the new concept will probably be its own issue, for this one I think it is enough for us to remove the unicode specific stuff from the existing exercise. |
@jmrunkle I can update it after my holidays ;) |
One angle that I don't think has been touched on here is that alphanumeric in unicode is a massive set. I assume we mean Latin alphanumerics, so basically the ASCII subset minus special chars. Otherwise agree with @jmrunkle on this:
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Perhaps even more simply stated as English letters and numbers (and possibly whitespace). |
I agree we should change this exercise according to what is discussed above. I updated the title and the description with a list of tasks and added labels to increase the visibility of the issue. |
This issue has been automatically marked as |
I would like to work on this issue. I have already tried to listen to the tasks and change these thing in the code. I don't know if the changes that i made are sufficient and useful. |
@andrerfcsantos looking at the discussion above, I'm wondering whether it makes sense to keep the task about control characters, or to remove that as well. If the goal of this concept exercise is to give a basic introduction of characters, maybe it's best to focus on the Latin alphabet, numbers, whitespace and punctuation, and leave things like control characters, unicode etc for a secondary concept exercise. |
Hi @sanderploegsma I would like to take on this issue, the scope is to remove the unicode and greek leeters? or do you think this needs a complete reformat? |
@manumafe98 sure, go ahead! As I mentioned above, IMO the exercise should only focus on introducing the So I'd remove the following aspects from the exercise:
Looking at the current instructions, that would leave the following tasks:
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I noticed in the
squeaky-clean
problem, there's a test as follows:However, there's no corresponding instruction to remove "non-standard" characters from the input string, so the test suite defines a different spec than the instructions.
I think the intent of the test is to remove any non-alphanumeric character or underscore from the input string, but I personally feel going too far into the details of Unicode (i.e. what is a "character" anyway?) distracts from the purpose of the exercise and can be discouraging. Perhaps the instructions can be clarified or the test can be removed or ignored.
Tasks
After some discussion (see comment below), an agreement was reached to modify the exercise to not include any unicode handling. Here are the tasks to do this:
Contributing to this task
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: