Revisit starter implementation policy for nextercism

The next version of Exercism breaks exercises into core exercises and branch exercises. It will therefore be possible for users to complete exercises in many different orders.

In light of this, we should revisit our current policy regarding starter implementations, which “assumes” a fixed order of exercise completion, and decide whether/how to update it. Discussion should occur in this issue thread.

Current policy for reference:

• Exercises 1-20: provide stubs for all required constructors and methods. Stubs should include the following body: throw new UnsupportedOperationException("Delete this statement and write your own implementation.");
• Exercises 21+: provide no stubs by default, but either (1) add hints to the hints.md file (which gets merged into the README.md for the exercise) or (2) provide stubs as in exercises 1-20 for exercises that demand complicated method signatures.

References: [1], [2]

[FridaTveit]

That’s a good point. I do think it’s an important part of the learning process to know how to create java files and work out method signatures though. Maybe we could decide on a difficulty below which all exercises should have starter implementations? For example, all exercises with difficulty 4 or below could have starter implementations. That might be easier to keep up to date. What do you think?

[stkent]

Closed by #986!