Choose core exercises structure

[robphoenix]

From #717:

If you haven't already, now would be a good time to do the following:

- [x] add a rough estimate of difficulty to each exercise (scale: 1-10) - [x] add topics to each exercise

• [ ] choose at most 20 exercises to be core exercises (set core: true, and delete the unlocked_by key)
• [ ] for each exercise that is not core, decide which exercise is the prerequisite (max 1)

If possible, leave 3 or 4 simple exercises as (core: false, unlocked_by: null), as this will provide new participants with some exercises that they can tackle even if they have not finished the first core exercise.

[robphoenix]

If you've not already seen this, it should be useful https://github.com/exercism/discussions/issues/175#issuecomment-318243990

[tleen]

I'm going to be mulling these over in my head for awhile as we have a ton of exercises. For starters what does everyone think our most simple exercises are?

These are our difficulty 1 exercises:

• accumulate
• etl
• gigasecond
• hamming
• hello-world
• leap
• raindrops
• scrabble-score

[tleen]

I'm gonna say our easiest exercises are:

• hello-world - to introduce the environment
• hamming - simple looping
• raindrops - conditionals

Then very similar:

• gigasecond - slightly more complex than hello world, but not too different either
• leap - another mathy but quick problem (leap and gigasecond should prob have one unlock the other?)

A little harder but also similar:

• scrabble-score - should use map style lookups (but doesn't have to)
• etl - should unlock from scrabble? another map exercise transforming the map instead of reading from it
• accumulate - to introduce functions as args

This is my rough read on the first few exercises.

[robphoenix]

tbh I'm finding this quite hard to conceptualise in my head how to sort the exercises, and have been kind of avoiding it. I'm going to need to sit down with a pen and paper and map it out I think.

[tleen]

Me too. It is really hard even doing baby steps like above. When confronted with a problem I don't know how to fix my first instinct is always to build something just to help get my head around the problem. The visualizer is awesome, and great for seeing the track come together, but at the same time I am much more of a command-line show-me-in-text guy. I spent some time over the weekend making a quick and dirty exercism-config-to-csv command line tool that would let me look at configs/sort them like a spreadsheet.

Some more quick tooling and adding a descriptive field (#798) may make this much easier.

Trying to map it out all at once is too prohibitive. We should start with some baby steps: identifying core and perhaps sequencing the difficulty 1&2's then move on from there.

Ultimately we will get through this, take a look at our early work and think, "nope it can be done better" and fix it. We will make some errors, but that is part of the process and we can always fix later!

[tleen]

Some more data that may be helpful, this is the difficulty -> exercise listing:

D	#	Exercises
1	8	hello-world, leap, gigasecond, hamming, raindrops, accumulate, etl, scrabble-score
2	9	pangram, bob, difference-of-squares, grains, luhn, rna-transcription, roman-numerals, strain, nucleotide-count
3	25	clock, acronym, triangle, series, parallel-letter-frequency, isogram, crypto-square, largest-series-product, sieve, protein-translation, anagram, word-count, robot-name, atbash-cipher, phone-number, prime-factors, nth-prime, beer-song, wordy, meetup, tree-building, kindergarten-garden, simple-cipher, tournament, all-your-base
4	13	twelve-days, house, pascals-triangle, bank-account, food-chain, perfect-numbers, allergies, diamond, custom-set, pig-latin, matrix, word-search, ledger
5	18	error-handling, secret-handshake, queen-attack, sum-of-multiples, pythagorean-triplet, circular-buffer, transpose, diffie-hellman, grade-school, saddle-points, binary-search, binary-search-tree, paasio, minesweeper, poker, variable-length-quantity, change, bowling
6	2	palindrome-products, robot-simulator
7	4	bracket-push, say, ocr-numbers, pov
8	1	forth
9	2	react, connect

(I've been building some stuff to help us get more information from the track configuration(s): dump track configuration, get all track configurations as a single file and run reports against that file.)

[tleen]

FWIW, here are the core exercises in other tracks:

Track	Exercises
bash	hello-world, leap, pangram, error-handling
c	hello-world, isogram, gigasecond, hamming, grains, beer-song, difference-of-squares, binary-search, roman-numerals, allergies, atbash-cipher, phone-number, clock, sieve, robot-simulator, pascals-triangle, binary, palindrome-products, scrabble-score
csharp	hello-world, leap, bob, sum-of-multiples, two-fer, raindrops, nucleotide-count, accumulate, grade-school, kindergarten-garden, clock, binary-search, allergies, saddle-points, markdown, book-store
ecmascript	hello-world, leap, rna-transcription, simple-cipher, pangram, bob, gigasecond, space-age, binary, prime-factors, matrix, linked-list, pascals-triangle, secret-handshake, grade-school, robot-name, wordy, list-ops
fsharp	hello-world, leap, bob, sum-of-multiples, space-age, raindrops, accumulate, grade-school, clock, beer-song, kindergarten-garden, queen-attack, robot-simulator, allergies, ocr-numbers, tree-building, binary-search-tree, pig-latin
java	hello-world, two-fer, hamming, gigasecond, scrabble-score, difference-of-squares, secret-handshake, matrix, triangle, rotational-cipher, saddle-points, flatten-array, word-count, robot-name, linked-list, binary-search, bank-account
javascript	hello-world, leap, rna-transcription, simple-cipher, pangram, bob, gigasecond, space-age, binary, prime-factors, matrix, linked-list, pascals-triangle, secret-handshake, grade-school, robot-name, wordy, list-ops
lua	hello-world, hamming, house, difference-of-squares, binary-search, matrix, isogram, bank-account, nth-prime, diamond, run-length-encoding, robot-name, leap, custom-set, pig-latin, list-ops, binary, allergies
r	hello-world, leap, hamming, raindrops, bob, anagram, sum-of-multiples, word-count, phone-number, rotational-cipher, largest-series-product