Advent of Julia

I’m a big fan of Advent of Code. It’s challenging yet cozy, and I’ve found that the puzzles help me learn more and think more critically about code than LeetCode or textbook problems have.

However, I’ve never finished an ongoing calendar. I tried to in 2023 and 2024, and in both years, I slowed down after a couple weeks. By that point, completing each puzzle within 24 hours started feeling more tedious than rewarding. As fun as AoC is, December is still for finals and Christmas.

Now that I have neither of those things on the horizon, I’d like to revisit AoC for fun and more programming practice. With ten months until December, let’s see how many of the ten calendars I can complete until AoC 2025 kicks off.

My solutions will be tracked here.

Why Julia? It’s been on my radar for several years, but I had never found a compelling use case or reason to switch from R or Python. R is much more ubiquitous in economics and Python in data science, and both languages have much larger and livelier communities.

In fairness to Julia, its 1.0 release was only in 2018, and I now wish I had taken more time to familiarize myself with the language since then. I tried AoC 2023 in Julia to give it a spin, but I wasted too much time wrestling with new syntax and idiosyncracies. Now that I have more time for AoC and now that the community has grown, I want to commit to learning Julia and more fully appreciate its capabilities.

My eye-opening experience to why I should seriously consider Julia was PhD macroeconomics. That year of solving models and seeing serious computational research taught me two things about my programming preferences: That I loathe MATLAB, and that Python is not fast enough for everything I want to do in economics and data science.

My frustrations could be due to programming inexperience or ignorance of better Python practices. Yet I’ve heard more than one professor say that Julia may be the future of macroeconomic modeling, or at least a significant part of it. There must be enough economists who share my frustrations that the short-term returns to learning Julia now aren’t negligble.

So how far away is widespread adoption? I’m not sure. Julia may stay niche not just in academic but within a few specific economic research areas. But even if my research interests mature into areas that Julia isn’t best suited for, I don’t want to regret passing up what I think is a very fun and exciting language to learn so far.