too many "required" questions on the Go track

[soniah]

I think there's too many "required" questions on the Go track - about 18. Some like Difference of Squares and Twelve Days could be skipped. Not all who come to Exercism will be beginners - what about the developers with some experience who want to quickly move to difficult problems? And these developers are more likely to become mentors.

(I'm a mentor, under a different github account)

[leenipper]

It is likely that many learning Go are already experienced, so you do have a good point. Of course, experienced developers will move quickly through "easy" exercises, don't you think ? But I do get it that those two exercises that you mentioned could be considered more nuisance than learning new concepts. @tleen what do you think? For a data point, I checked the python track, and there are 14 core exercises. I think the guideline was no more than 20.

[tleen]

We spent a ton of time trying to get the ordering right. Guess we will be able to tell how successful we were based on feedback. I guess I would like to hear from more people before we rejigger the track. But happy to encourage the feedback so it can help us reformulate.

[hilary]

I'm an experienced developer, and I found the rich set of core questions useful (I haven't finished the track). On the other hand, I ended up turning off mentoring and switching to Independent Mode so I could forge ahead after waiting for days to get feedback on my early core questions.

[soniah]

That's my feeling. I've been learning other languages and I have bursts of programming then nothing for a week .

So the mentoring slow me down, and looking at several other solutions gives me the best feedback.

I'm a mentor on Golang, and a student on too many other languages...

On Fri, 20 Jul 2018 at 05:47, Hilary (hilz) Holz notifications@github.com wrote:

I'm an experienced developer, and I found the rich set of core questions useful (I haven't finished the track). On the other hand, I ended up turning off mentoring and switching to Independent Mode so I could forge ahead after waiting for days to get feedback on my early core questions.

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[ghost]

I switched off mentoring because receiving feedback was a process that took too long. I wanted to complete the questions at my pace but independent mode completely throws away the design of the "track". The next alternative for me was to just start from easy and progress, but it just feels really unorganized since I could be on my 50th question and get something like "Oh, so this might be your first problem without an example file!"

I like how the questions have subject tags, but I feel like maintaining a hierarchy based on difficulty is what makes exercism great. It would be much better if there was a path I could follow that branches into different fields as I progress through the track in independent mode.

[hilary]

I ended up collecting the information about the sequence of the questions from mentored mode, and the information about what unlocks what from the config.json in the track, and sorting out the order on my own...

[hilary]

I'm going to close this for now, as I've come to the conclusion that we have too few core exercises rather than too many.