exercism/typescript

New Exercise ✨: Resistor Color Trio

rodmagaldi opened this issue · 6 comments

Hello there! I'm new here, and I want to implement the following exercise:

https://github.com/exercism/problem-specifications/tree/main/exercises/resistor-color-trio

I saw resistor exercises on the typescript track, and I'm not happy with how the instructions are laid out for the students. I'd like to give it a go and see if I could do that any better.

Can anyone give me a green light for this?

Thanks a lot!

Hi there!

As this is a practice exercise, we do ask that you follow that repository, but you can add more instructions add the bottom of the file using the instructions.append.md file (see Practice Exercise Docs).

Here are some more pointers:

  • ⬆️ The instructions and test cases for many practice exercises originate in the Exercism-wide problem-specifications repo. If the exercise you changed is listed there in the exercises folder, please consider the following.
  • Improvements to the instructions.md file should be made in the problem-spec repo so that all tracks can benefit. You can open a PR there instead.
  • Test cases selected in the .meta/tests.toml file need to be implemented in the <exercise>.test.ts file according to the specification in canonical-data.json.

If you wish to implement resistor-color-trio: go for it. Follow CONTRIBUTING in this repo and the Shared documentation on implementing a practice exercise. If you wish to improve the instructions of resistor-color or resistor-color-duo, decide if that can be done using the instructions.append.md approach, and if not, open an issue / PR in problem-specifications instead.

Hey @SleeplessByte !

What I intended to do was improve mainly the instructions for the problem.

A while back, I was studying for job interviews and I remember liking the way HackerRank structures its problem specs, in a few ways actually:

  • Separation of sections in the descriptive text
  • Sample inputs and outputs
  • Clear instructions for function parameters

Screenshot from 2021-10-19 11-51-54

For instance, the resistor-color-duo problem could specify that the expected function parameter is an array, but I don't know if it's only an array in the typescript implementation - I'm not sure this could be completely language-agnostic and as far as I'm aware, it also depends on the test files.

Any experienced programmer can easily deduce what the expected input is based on the test cases, but I suppose the main public of Exercism are not experienced professionals.

I'd love to hear your take on this before moving forward and deciding how to contribute!

Exercism is meant for people who already know a programming language (but they don't need to be expert programmers), meaning we don't need to cater everything for people who don't know how to program at all.

Changing the exercise instructions format is something you probably want to raise in exercism/exercism, because it would be a cross-track change and probably should be consistent within a track.

Thanks for the input, @SleeplessByte !

I'll be back to contribute as soon as I have a better understanding of Exercism's MO.

PR opened: implementation of the resistor-color-trio exercise.

Closed by #814