One of my recent side projects has been to study, understand, and implement the PubGrub version solving algorithm. I’m not building any particular application or product with it, I simply find it interesting! I also thought to myself: maybe this would also be a good reason to explore Clojure (since 2025 is the Year of Clojure, after all).
However, after making steady early progress (the easy parts), I found myself somewhat stuck when implementing the algorithm’s main loop. How do I even do a straightforward “while true” loop in a functional and immutable language? Realizing that I didn’t yet understand how to translate even simple constructs into Clojure’s terms, I started to feel like I’d bitten off more than I can chew.
Perhaps I am trying to work too many new concepts at once:
- Learning a new programming language (Clojure)
- Learning a new programming paradigm (Functional)
- Learning a new algorithm family (SAT Solving)
Maybe I should take a beat, reflect on where I’m at, and alter my plan to better isolate these concepts. After doing so, I decided to make a small pivot. Instead of starting with Clojure, I’ll instead implement the algorithm in a familiar and algorithm-friendly language: Python. I use Python for Advent of Code so I’m quite a bit more familiar with writing short, focused, algorithm-heavy programs. This isolates the third concept and lets me focus on the hard part first: PubGrub.
Eventually, once I fully understand the algorithm and have written my own reference implementation, I’ll write the code again in Clojure. This isolates concepts 1 and 2 which are similar enough to tackle at the same point (plus, you can’t really separate them in the first place). Lesson learned, though: don’t try to mix too many new things at once.
This is also why I don’t usually recommend that folks attempt Advent of Code with an unfamiliar language. In my opinion, if you want to obtain all 50 stars with a new language, you’re gonna have a bad time. If you care more about learning and less about the stars, then I say go for it!