Am I alone in hating code challenge questions?

Question

I've tried several, and I've mostly lost. That may color my perception. But the questions seem absurd to me. I don't see how they're connected at all to the courses on the app, and many of the questions are more about arcane rules than actually solving problems with code. Is there value in knowing all the ways to create undefined variables, or what happens when I take a string, multiply it by a negative number and then add one? Why is there a time limit? Some questions have code that's hard to parse, and losing simply because ten or fifteen seconds have passed only encourages me to guess.

It's possible I'm just being a sore loser, but I really wonder what the value of it is supposed to be. What should I be doing differently to get the most out of it?

Answer 1

You're not alone on this. I myself find them very repetitive, although once in a while I come upon an actual useful question.

https://www.sololearn.com/discuss/1598243/?ref=app

Answer 2

First: Before you start challenges, make sure you have practiced your language of choice enough to feel confident.

Second: Read the code snippet in the order it is executed, not in the order its written. (Also you become quicker with practice.)

Third: Some riddles may seem far away from real life or treating something you wouldn't do anyway. But they still can shed light on blind spots you may still have.

Fourth: They are just *one* way to help you improve, not the main way. See them as practice for reading and understanding code quickly which you haven't written yourself.

Answer 3

Time limit is very annoying, but it minimalizes the chances for cheating.
Without timelimit you could just write and execute the program in somewhere and cheat. If there was no timelimit, I would assume that first the challenges are filled with cheaters, who don't cheat would suffer from others' cheating and either they would stop playing challenges or they would start cheating too. Secondary the challenges would lose their point, because of all cheaters almost always got 5 points. And thirdly there would be nobody to challenge each others.

Anyways the challenges would have a little longer timelimit.

Answer 4

Thanks, Diego, I hadn't seen that thread.