I’ve considered Mercury and Picat this year but I don’t want to go without regex and/or associative arrays. Also Mercury seems moreso about performance than semantics.

I think it’s Prolog for me again this year but with an effort to complete the problems in a more “Prologesque” way.

Prolog is a solid pick w for its unique approach to problem-solving. If you’re into exploring tools alongside languages, check out Rig.rs for Rust

it’s great for building modular workflows, and its type safety might make tackling some Advent of Code problems extra satisfying.

Julia

Last year I had just started learning Rust so used that. That turned out to be a mistake, I was spending most of my time figuring out what the borrow checker was complaining about rather than looking at the actual problems.

Hopefully that's behind me now so I will use Rust again.

Python. I want to focus on having fun with the puzzles instead of decrypting unfamiliar syntax errors.

https://github.com/betaveros/noulith

Designing a programming language to speedrun Advent of Code: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/38255808

> I did not design and implement a programming language for the sole or even primary purpose of leaderboarding on Advent of Code. It just turned out that the programming language I was working on fit the task remarkably well.

-- "betaveros, the guy who won 1st place in Advent of Code every single year since 2019"

I used Common Lisp as my primary language for 2015-2022 and Python for 2023. I've used a few other languages along the way, in parallel to my main effort: Rust, Ada, Python, C++.

I'll probably just use Python this year, so many things are "baked in" to the language that it's the most straightforward. Only downside really is performance, but if you need high performance compiled code for Advent of Code problems you've generally not solved the problem efficiently.

I watched somebody on YouTube solve some AoC problems in Excel, so I’m going to try that this year. Not sure how far I’m going to get, but it’ll be a fun challenge!

I’m ready to give zig another try.

gleam was a lot of fun last year, for those who are gleam curious.

For those who are doing something like protocol hackers, instead of adventure code, ocaml 5+ with effects was super fun

I didn't do it last year, but the years before I used Racket and Common Lisp. I might try Common Lisp again since I really want to rediscover the experience of programming w/ Sly (a fork of SLIME).

I'm also considering trying to solve everything with Z3.

Typescript for me, although I only ever do the first few days. I don't have the time to spend on it after that.

This year I will go with Nushell.

(Maybe will cheat with making Nushell plugin in Rust).

Typescript because that's all I know.

C# again. I aspire to get back to C++ but this isn’t the year for me.

?? turn <language of choice> into api over prolog ??

Will be doing it in F# this year. Last year I did C#/Rust split until real life took over and they ended up being too similar to each other at solving AoC type of challenges.

BASIC. In memoriam

math :)