Coding Challenges - Dlang or Generic

[Siarhei Siamashka]

On Tuesday, 10 January 2023 at 00:17:18 UTC, Paul wrote:
> I was wondering if anyone knew of any coding challenges 
> available where the input and output are specified and its left 
> to the programmer to find a solution?  Free would be nice but 
> even paid services would be worth considering.  I'm taking a D 
> class right now and it has little challenges in the lessons 
> where much of the work is done for you, but I'm thinking of a 
> site/service that is dedicated to these types of challenges 
> (without doing any work for you).

What kind of D class is that? Are you learning D language in a 
school or university? Or is it some kind of online language 
course?

I can recommend the https://atcoder.jp site and their beginner 
contests. At least the first two tasks of each beginner contest 
are relatively easily solvable by anyone without any kind of 
special knowledge or training. The next beginner contest is 
[scheduled in 5 days](https://atcoder.jp/contests/abc285). The 
previous beginner contest was 
[here](https://atcoder.jp/contests/abc284) and the accepted 
solutions in D language can be found 
[here](https://atcoder.jp/contests/abc284/submissions?f.LanguageName=D&f.Status=AC&f.Task=&f.User=&page=1). You can try to solve any tasks from the previous contests yourself as a practice without any time limit and without any stress of being ranked.

Additionally, there are "heuristic" contests and they are very 
fun in their own way. You can try 
https://atcoder.jp/contests/ahc015/tasks/ahc015_a as an example, 
which essentially boils down to implementing an AI for a simple 
game. Implementing some sort of a trivial solution is easy. For 
example, always tilting the box in the same direction is a valid 
solution. But it won't score a lot of points. Doing something 
smarter will result in a better score. And again, the already 
existing solutions in D language are also available 
[here](https://atcoder.jp/contests/ahc015/submissions?f.Task=&f.LanguageName=D&f.Status=AC&f.User=).