Sometimes Julia feels like cheating

https://www.codewars.com/kata/582aafca2d44a4a4560000e7

I just tried my first problem on Codewars and realised: This solution feels like cheating

7 points · 5 comments · view on lemmy.world

5 Comments

verstra@programming.dev · 6 pts · 3y (4 replies)

What's the solution in Julia?

floorjam@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 3y (3 replies)

I first did something with findfirst, which needed some bounds checks. Then I saw another answer and they used searchsortedfirst which is just it ... Even the documentation reads like the problem description

verstra@programming.dev · 1 pts · 3y (2 replies)

Ah so the library is just made for problems like this. Who would have thought :)

MatFi@lemmy.thias.xyz · 2 pts · 3y (1 reply)

Naahh… searchsortedfirst is simply faster than other search algorithms (in this specific case). Extremely useful in many applications.It ist there because Julia cares about efficiency

floorjam@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 3y

This helped me realize how much this aligns with my problems (and I guess the spirit of this test problem). Sometimes you have special knowledge of your data and can use much more efficient functions that are just there in Julia.