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For me (and most of my friends/coworkers) the point of AoC was to write in some language that you always wanted to learn but never had the chance. The AoC problems tend to be excellent material for a crash course in a new PL because they cover a range of common programming tasks.

Historically good candidates are:

- Rust (despite it's popularity, I know a lot of devs who haven't had time to play with it).

- Haskell (though today I'd try Lean4)

- Racket/Common Lisp/Other scheme lisp you haven't tried

- Erlang/Elixir (probably my choice this year)

- Prolog

Especially for those langs that people typically dabble in but never get a change to write non-trivial software in (Haskell, Prolog, Racket) AoC is fantastic for really getting a feel for the language.





Yes, this year I'm going for Lean 4: https://github.com/ngrislain/lean-adventofcode-2025

It's a great language. It's dependent-types / theorem-proving-oriented type-system combined with AI assistants makes it the language of the future IMO.


Isn't the whole point of AoC to NOT use AI? Even says so in the FAQ

Yes, I'm doing it without AI to learn the language, nonetheless I do think that Lean 4 + AI is a super-powerful combination.

Like with the leader board. People do it to score points, not to learn. Hence, cheating.



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