[List Ops]: clarity about what operations we are permitted to use

The instructions ask us to implement map, filter etc “without using existing functions.”. But what does that mean? For example, append can simply be return list1+list2 but that seems like cheating, and not in the spirit of the exercise. But which resources are we permitted to draw on and which not? It’s not very clear what counts as a reasonable solution and what solutions are just cheating.

[BethanyG]

Hi @scmbradley 👋🏽

Just chiming in here to say that since we’ve re-ordered the track, we have had a few questions on this particular exercise. See #3142, #3141, and the related #2078 in problem-specifications. It is probably due for a little going over/revising.

As discussed in #2078, there are several avenues we could take in clarifying/filling out this exercise:

1. An instruction append, along the lines of this exercise – not that we have to be that imperative, but we can add a few instructions/variations. As @bobahop noted in his replies, we probably don’t want to do anything that might “give away” a specific solution, but we could always suggest/encourage thinking about certain modules, approaches, or functions in a hinty sort of way.
2. A hints.md file, similar to the one for this exercise. I especially like the opening paragraph that reminds the student that there are multiple paths/strategies. We might outline useful groups of functions or modules at different “levels” of difficulty. Again, these would probably be in the form of questions like “how might x help you to not use the + operator here??” or “could y help you out with this?”
3. A set of mentor notes (see the website-copy repo for examples for Python). In the mentor notes, we could encourage mentors to nudge students to challenge themselves with one or more variations on the exercise.
4. Some additional Python-specfic tests that nudge a student in a particular direction. We’d want to be careful to not fish for a specific implementation, so this approach might be limited.

We’d welcome PRs connected to any of the above, and we’d be happy to help you through the PR process, if you’d like to take on any of the work. Since we’ve gotten multiple sets of feedback on this exercise, I was thinking of consolidating the comments into one issue for tracking purposes.

Let us know if you’d like to take a shot at improving this exercise, and I can assign the consolidated issue to you!

[BethanyG]

@scmbradley - closing this in favor of the tracking issue. Please comment there if you would like to work on it and submit a PR. Many thanks for filing this!