I recommend Bruce Eckel’s “Thinking in Java” as a good beginner book. Curious though why the Robotics team chose Java? Are they perhaps doing non-embedded systems programming?

That’s Flashpoint! I have it and actually quite like it, though it’s not popular with the rest of the family 🙂 I really enjoy its logical mechanics

Alrighty! Solved day3 with relative ease - github.com/gnmathur/aoc.... I doubt there are very many ways to solve this but it will be interesting to see what other languages come up with. I'll be esp. interested in Python and Scala solutions.

Solved Day 2 - github.com/gnmathur/aoc... I am not too happy with the Part 2 solution and I'm sure there's a more efficient and elegant algorithm. Will try and find that in the next pass

I am... It's funny how much people's experience mirrors in some respects - I see so many start each year and then the attempts fade away as the problems get harder, require more time, and regular life starts taking over 🙂

bsky.app/profile/gmat...

The goal this time is to

* explore Java 21 constructs
* functional programming techniques made possible in modern Java
* figure out ways to reduce mutability as much as possible